A fascinating question for corporations is how much they should get involved in politics. What is the role for Corporate Political Advocacy? Sometimes Politics Just Comes For You It can be hard to avoid politics sometimes; it just involves some companies by accident. I have no inside knowledge but I doubt Delta really had an…
Category: Positioning
Who Thinks Brands Should be Involved in Social Issues?
YouGov is a survey firm and [in 2018] they uncovered what consumers think of firms getting involved in social issues. What was the result? Who thinks brands should be involved in social issues? Political Involvement From Brands I think this is a fascinating topic. I would expect more and more political involvement from brands. If…
Good Marketing And Social Missions
Managers often have challenges understanding how to position their brands and companies when contentious public issues find them. More interesting in some ways are companies whose managers seek out contentious issues. It is very hard to measure the net impact of having a contentious social mission. Experiments are hard to run on social missions. Yet,…
Buying And Selling Attention
Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants is an interesting book about buying and selling attention. History Of The Market For Attention I must confess I enjoyed the first half more than the end. The end of the book is a pretty conventional view of where we are now. I don’t think anyone will be surprised to…
Market Driving (And Being Just Really Good)
Some firms don’t seem to follow the market. Instead, they chart their own course. They are market driving. Who Drives The Market? The classic example of such a firm might be Apple. It looks to many that Apple is able to influence tastes in the market rather than just serve the consumers’ tastes. Whether this…
Confusopoly
In the UK the agency responsible for promoting competition and generally getting consumers a good deal was the Office of Fair Trading, the OFT. (Written a few years ago this UK regulators have since changed). Interestingly this government agency used a concept from Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) to illustrate a major problem in competition….
Ron Paul’s Marketing Lesson
Politics can teach us a lot about marketing. Ron Paul’s story teaches us more than most. I’m not a Ron Paul follower but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from what he has done well and his problems. What is Ron Paul’s marketing lesson? The Marketing Concept When we teach marketing we suggest trying to…
Being One-Dimensional
In a positioning map there aren’t many absolute requirements. A requirement that really must be kept however is that each axis represents a single dimension. This is the importance of being one-dimensional. Multiple Terms On One Axis Creates A Mess If you try to have more than one dimension on each axis it isn’t so much…
Boring Positioning Maps
I often discuss mistaken thinking. This post is a little different. I’m discussing something worse than being wrong and that is being boring. Specifically, producing boring positioning maps Not Wrong, Just A Boring Positioning Map A positioning map illustrates marketing strategies. Here I discuss the axes of which there are two generic types. Where there…
