MV newsletter - January 2007

Click here for free tools and know-how materials from the Mud Valley™ strategy & brand marketing community.

The by-product is the product

There are some very innovative ways to do your market research.

Have a look at Capessa. It has been developed by Zizo for P&G for Yahoo!

What is its function? To deliver ethnographic research data to P&G. Women talk about their lives, and P&G keeps its finger on the pulse.

And the featured advertisement for 9 January 2007 was for Vicks. Is that not a P&G brand? Market research, advertising, word-of-mouth, social concern repositioning – not a bad combination.

20-pagers

Talking about advertising, we would like to let you know that we have just released our first 20-pager booklet, on Brand Rationalisation.

The idea behind these booklets, as they develop, is that most business books are only worth 20 pages, so we will focus on providing the action-focused parts which matter, and leave out the remaining 380 pages of repetition.

The booklets are written in Powerpoint so you can use the visuals, process maps etc. to cobble together a quick and meaningful presentation.

We regret that, at £2.99 (approx. €4.46 or $US 5.81), they do not come to you for free, but close enough.

The series will expand rapidly over the next few months. Next stop – Second Brands.

Click here for more.

Lying with integrity

We have mentioned Andy Graham of The One Brand Group before, for his thought that brand marketing is about selling the customer to the customer, not your products to the customer (that bit will follow if you get the first part right).

We have just read his latest blog (about lying with integrity), and it was so excellent, that we hope you will want to read it too.

Click here for a bit of provocation.

Blue Ocean

If you are a fan of Blue Ocean Strategy, or even of strategy generally, the 2007 Strategy & Futures Conference will take place in London on 29 January 2007.

Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, the authors of the book, will be circling the podium.

If you have missed it, Blue Ocean Strategy is about how you identify and exploit clear market space which you can inhabit in (price) harmony with your customers, unthreatened by those sharky competitors who occupy the bloody red oceans, and drain you off your profitability.

Country marketing

OK, you have marketed consumables, you have marketed services, you have marketed capital equipment, and you have brokered million dollar deals, but have you ever sold a whole country?

Here goes.

• Belgium tel: +32 (0)2 747 0945
• France tel: +33 (0)1 76 63 74 09
• UK tel: +44 (0)208 099 7385

or by e-mail at enquiries@mudvalley.co.uk.

© 2007, Mud Valley ™ brand marketing community.

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