Marketers are trained to believe insights are the foundations of brand strategy and powerful insights about the target customer yield strong brands. But what exactly constitutes an ‘insight’ and how do you recognize one when you see it? What makes one idea worthy of building a brand around and another simply ‘nice to know’?
Many marketers asked Santa for a social coupon campaign for 2011. The explosive growth of Groupon and Groupon clones (BuyWithMe, LivingSocial, SocialBuy, and Tippr), offering “ridiculously huge” coupons (50-90% off), is taking marketing plans by storm.
Hypno-Synectics is a technique that can help marketers and planners do a better job of getting respondents to brainstorm in focus groups. It combines the 50-year old brainstorming technique of Synectics (the original “outside-the-box” technique) with the scientific use of hypnosis.
Abraham Maslow, the man famous for formulating one of the most ubiquitous tools in the marketing toolbox, the Hierarchy of Needs, was also famous for admonishing against over reliance on one tool.
Our understanding of pricing has come a long way since 1890 when Alfred Marshall published his treatise on the economic scissors of supply and demand. Pricing is no longer a purely economic challenge to be addressed through studies of market elasticity.
