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I am heavy into marketing, and even more heavily into technology. You also might see some blog posts about modern art spring up here and there - so don't freak out.

I also blog at The Direct Marketing Voice, and throw around ideas as a Market Intelligence Analyst at QuantumDigital.

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6 different ways to attract customers

Credit where due, I was browsing http://www.notorious-rob.com/ and came across this graphic that Rob found in @issue: the online journal of business & design (why had I not found this magazine before!).  Turns out they're citing it from a book that's coming out by Marty Neumeier, who has delivered some very interesting presentations before. 

Anyhow, this graphic seeks to compare the different disciplines of "wooing a customer". Hilarious:

Besides this, I did happen upon a great video that encompasses many of the strategic marketing shifts, a' la Marty Neumeier:

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Posted 9 days ago by Luis Paez 

Best Twitter App

Came across an interesting poll that shows people's "favorite" twitter desktop app.

This doesn't necessarily mean it's the "Best" twitter app :)

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Posted 10 days ago by Luis Paez 

Hyundai shows the way out of a Recession

Something that many of us in the advertising space have been saying for a while now... that brands need to spend hard in a recession to distance and define themselves as the economy recovers.  Those that run & hide with their budgets will see their bottom lines shrink accordingly.  Ad Age is now rewarding those brands that have adopted this proactive recession strategy, naming Hyundai and Wal-Mart as the top brands in their Marketer of the Year 2009 awards.

Now, will the rest of the economy wake up?

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Posted 13 days ago by Luis Paez 

Virgin Atlantic's app for flying virgins

I'm not sure if this is for real, but Virgin Atlantic released an iphone app that supposedly assists flyers who are afraid to fly.  See screenshot below. Is a computer device ever going to take the place of someone sitting next to you on the same flight telling you the same thing?  Credibility goes to the human being who has a real story to tell.  Not an iphone app.

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Posted 18 days ago by Luis Paez 

Post-recession Consumerism

John Gerzema is the co-author of the book, The Brand Bubble and gave a great talk on TED, where he outlines a barrage of great points, not exclusive to the fact that 80% of the US population was born after WWII, so in effect this recession is our "Great depression", and the ethics of the connected life are affecting our identities as consumers.  One of his slides focuses on a shift of consumers to de-leverage themselves (just as banks and companies are de-leveraging), so they are finding ways to do that paying by debit vs. credit (as a recent VISA study had found). "Declasse consumption" essentially is the new strategy meaning a more thoughtful approach to what is purchased, focusing on high quality or high value goods as opposed to quantity / popularity of goods/services.

What does this mean for the average brand or business?  Focus on marketing yourselves to provide value to your customers.  Frito Lay is used as an example by John Gerzema in that they found that most of their customers had more money at the beginning of the month as opposed to the end of the month (paycheck cycles), so they staggared their products offering larger bags of chips at the beginning of the month on store endcaps to match their customers' budgets.  Interesting way of thinking about product placement strategy.

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Posted 19 days ago by Luis Paez 

Google's entry to the GPS world should have happened earlier

Google announced this week that they will be rolling out GPS-functionality (like the ones that Garmin & Tom-Tom have) out to their Android Phones.  They will also be coming out with hardware that will allow you to easily prop the handset onto your dash, so it can function as a traditional Car-based GPS unit when you're not talking on the phone (I'm assuming eventually netbooks will also be able to do this).  What amazes me is not that Google was able to do this and is approaching the market by offering essentially "free" GPS service, but that the traditional businesses (Garmin & Tom Tom) didn't have the guts in previous years to establish Google as a channel partner. They were likely too enamored with their $79/year Map updates that they sell to current customers.  I have a Garmin and love it's quality, but wondered to myself why they could not just put bluetooth in their units and enable gps units to data link to a cell phone (with a data plan).  This would have allowed Garmin to offer google maps as a feature (maybe a $ service?)  - and not this year - they could have done this in 2006.  If they did, then this would be old news:

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Posted 25 days ago by Luis Paez 

Be honest about the Brand - and don't pretend you're Charlie Rose

AdAge launched a hilarious and scathing review, from a marketing perspective, of what everyone can learn by NBC's missteps with regard to the Jay Leno Show.  I did manage to watch the Jay Leno Show last week and realized very quickly that Jay tries to be serious (when interviewing 1 on 1) - sort of Charlie Rose-esque - but unfortunately fails at it.  They should have stuck to the parodies and "man on the street" segments.

Anyway, AdAge calls out the fact that NBC paints the Jay Leno brand as being an "institution" that everyone in America would watch irrespective of the quality of programming - because it's Jay!  Instead, the quality breaks through and we realize that Jay isn't funny ALL the time, and thus, his status as an "institution" is falling sharply. It would not have been so bad for NBC if they hadn't have painted the brand in such a way... it just erodes trust in the network itself.  A lesson for anyone promoting product brands of any sort.

7. It's dangerous to pretend your brand is something it's not.
NBC executives, in marketing Leno's move to prime time, tried to position him as a beloved broadcast institution -- like they were bestowing a comedic gift on America -- as a cover for their entirely cynical cost-cutting. In reality, though, it was clear all along that late-night Leno functioned as a sort of utility: an easy, default pre-bedtime diversion literally not ready for prime time, even after 17 years. NBC used to offer substantive entrees at 10 ("ER," "Law & Order"), and figured that viewers could be forced to switch to comfort food. But Leno at 11:35 wasn't ever really even meatloaf; he was more like that stale bag of Funyuns in the back of the cupboard you were willing to settle for because mindless late-night snacking is ... mindless.

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Posted 27 days ago by Luis Paez 

Gen Y Says: Stop Pigeonholing Us!

I am very confused by all the studies and claims that "Gen Y" either hates or loves email.  Why does it matter?  While you may be able to derive some affinity for social media based on someone's age at this point, there are still those GenYers who prefer printed paper, some who prefer SMS, or some who prefer Facebook. 

We are going in a direction where a company needs to have multiple voices.  Those voices you can consider are "platforms" that everyone talks about all the time (email, facebook, etc.).  A brand's job is just to enable their employees to speak in those different voices. Customers & the brands' community at large can then consume in the manner that they prefer.  Case in point: my baby boomer+ mother-in-law uses Facebook more than my Gen X wife.  She may be more open to keeping up with you on Facebook than Email.  How are you gearing marketing toward her?

We should start talking about managing each and every demographic - over each and every platform.  It's the holy grail of niche marketing, and too few want to talk about that (or do a survey on it).

Link to the article that tripped off this post:

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Posted 1 month ago by Luis Paez 

iPhone iTouch is blowing past other technologies in terms of adoption

If you look at raw subscribers, this is a great argument for the supremacy of the iPhone right now.

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Posted 1 month ago by Luis Paez 

Best Idea for RSS - But why do I have to install it?

FeedAFever is one of the best ideas I've seen so far for RSS reading.  I am heavily into feeds, and am guilty of bringing up my feed reader at a stop light once or twice.  Consequently, I was excited to learn that a company finally has understood the pains of we at the heavy end of the RSS reading spectrum.  We do, in fact, get a little "guilty" as the site puts it when we have things we have not read yet.  This software seeks to address that, by analyzing the posts from selected feeds and comparing them to other blogs that you watch. The popular topics, bubble up, much like popurls.com, but they do so in your customized feed reader. 

Great idea - one that google reader should have adopted a long time ago - I'm not sure why they're so interested in showing you "who" liked a story (you can see other google reader people who clicked the like button), when they really should show you "how many" people liked a story.  Then I can drill down on who liked it  The frustrating part is that it's not SaaS. I have to find a server of my own and install it.  There's a reason Wordpress launched a service, ya know...

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Posted 1 month ago by Luis Paez