The quest for brand or customer ‘loyalty’ is one of a number of examples of what we could call faux marketing. Faux marketing adopts all the trappings of real marketing, so it looks like the real thing. But underneath the surface it’s doing something...

I’ve written about ‘the consumer decision-making revolution’ in today’s issue of Marketing magazine . If you’ve read my previous articles, I hope you’re beginning to get the picture. Information-flows (top down or bottom up?), metrics (are we measuring...

Commenting on my last post on ‘stimulus-response’ Andrew Weir says: “In my humble view marketing should focus on delivering great brand experiences (experience of a product, service, brand) as well as brand promises (stimulus-response?). It is vital that...

OK. This is a real biggie. It’s about an error – a misperception – that pervades everything marketers do: their beliefs about how marketing works (and therefore what they are trying to do when they do marketing), how they seek to do it, and how they measure...

I tried to do a summary of what the long-term effects of new discoveries in psychology might be on marketing here . If you're busy, I've also done a quick 8-point summary . The bottom line is very simple. There are lots of people out there touting...

From what I can see, there are two very good ways of getting lost in the maze of psychology and human decision making. The first is to accept, at some level or other, the insane delusions of ‘rationality’ as invented by the economics profession. I say...

A number of people have asked me what I read as background to my Marketing article on ‘predictably irrational’ consumer decision-making. Aside from various interviews I’ve done over the years, here is a list of the main books I’ve read in this arena....

So here’s the agenda for reinventing marketing I promised a while ago. First off, we need to recognise the core. Organisations apply knowledge and resources to supply individuals with products and services that are better quality and/or cheaper than these...

I wrote today in Marketing magazine about discoveries in psychology that are revolutionising our understanding of human decision-making. Many marketers are seizing upon these findings as grist to the mill of marketing’s prevailing persuasion paradigm...

OK, rant about marketing fads over. The point I’m really trying to make is that online social networking is just one small sub-set of a vast new continent of possibility: Volunteered Personal Information (VPI). It’s the big picture of VPI, not just one...

From my research into Volunteered Personal Information (VPI) I think it is, for most marketers, most of the time. I wrote about VPI in Marketing Magazine last week. The underlying observation is that individuals are increasingly using digital/Internet...

The alternative to ‘ stimulus-response ’ is to assume that, generally speaking, individuals buy and use marketing as they do any other product or service – when it adds value to them … and they ignore marketing that doesn’t add value. That begs a load...

The big assumption behind stimulus-response marketing is that all the power rests with stimulus (and the stimulator), and that the response is just an automatic by-product of the nature of the stimulus. In other words, the responder doesn’t really have...

The way I’ve been talking in some of my previous blogs you may be forgiven for thinking I’m against any sort of marketing campaigns. Not at all. Hopefully, the point I’m trying to make is a tad more subtle: there’s a big difference between those campaigns...

If I’m on to the right track about Punch Bag marketing , a couple of implications follow. Here’s one of them. Imagine two alternative scenarios. Under the first scenario you devote your core resources and attention to moving your base (i.e. your core...