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Are You Marketing Your Product Backstory?

Several weeks ago, I noted an interesting story about how Dole is offering "farm codes" printed onto stickers that are placed on organic bananas offering consumers the chance to get to know more about the farm that grew the banana by visiting www.doleorganic.com.  On Dole Organic, you can see such information as a description of … Read more

Corporate Bloggers and the Rise of the Accidental Spokesperson

In the world of public relations, a spokesperson can sometimes seem like the most important element of any campaign.  Though I don’t quite understand some of my colleagues necessity to always propose a celebrity in this spokesperson role, I do understand the very real need to establish credibility and a spokesperson can be a great … Read more

The ROI of Blogging: Share Your Top 5 Stories

Two months ago, Charlene Li of Forrester produced a report on the ROI of blogging by comparing the relative spend on blogs to the spend required for focus group based research.  While some people immediately pointed out flaws in this reasoning, it was a great first step towards trying to define a model for measuring … Read more

The Death of the Invisible Agency

There was a time when, apart from industry awards shows and the occasional book from an advertising or PR industry legend – agencies were largely invisible to consumers.  Marketing agencies created advertisements, managed relationships with the press, and generated campaign strategy on behalf of a client, but remained in the background.  Since then, you have … Read more

How to Create a Microbrand Like GapingVoid

It might sometimes seem like everything is going micro.  With microlending, loans are getting smaller.  With online video, entertainment is getting shorter.  Technology devices are, of course, getting smaller. Micro is hot.  So it should come as no surprise that the next big thing coming fast into the marketing world is actually a little thing: … Read more

5 Brilliant Marketing Ideas from SxSW

Over the next week, I’ll posting some of the other insights I will be taking from the event, but in the meantime here are just a few marketing ideas that struck me as remarkable or noteworthy from SxSW: Using the tag as the tagline.  Everywhere you look there are signs posted telling you what tag … Read more

A Friday Question: Do We Need Platformism?

This idea is sure to rile some people up.  We are all familiar with the concepts of other "isms" where we are judged based solely on looks, race, physical appearance or some other subjective measure.  Sexism, Racism, Elitism … these are things no one likes, and most educated people know these are wrong.  The issue … Read more

A Recap of the PSFK Conference

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend the first conference event put together by Piers and the team at PSFK focused on trends and ideas.  The agenda was very compelling going into it, and I did leave with many interesting insights and new ideas about marketing and communications.  Though I unfortunately had to duck out … Read more

IdeaBar: Creationstorms

Over the weekend I revisted ShootExperience, a site that has the really interesting premise of getting people together in a single location at a set time to photograph in a community and share images.  Describing their mission as "helping people to rediscover their everyday environment and lives through photography,"  the site has launched the Connective … Read more

Product (RED): Smart Social Marketing or Meaningless Celebrity?

In a great post over at PSFK – Piers publishes the content of a conversation he had with Julie Cordua, the VP of Marketing for the often talked about Product (RED) social marketing campaign.  In case you’re among the few people that hasn’t seen the campaign, it created waves last year by introducing a for-profit … Read more

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#1 WSJ & USA Today Bestselling Author

In addition to Non-Obvious Thinking, Rohit is the author of 10 books on trends, the future of business, building a more human brand with storytelling and how to create a more diverse and inclusive world.

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