Sponsor a high street

Why couldn’t Unilever take over a street and fill empty shops with its brands on a permanent basis creating a new shopping experience for consumers? They could give something back to the community by offering space to small business and students to sell their own products and talents.

Daniel Todaro, MD, Gekko

Seize the mobile moment

Lucy Tesseras is right about the importance of ‘moment marketing’ and one area primed to capitalise on it is mobile. What better way to instantaneously communicate with a consumer?

Consumers don’t want to be bombarded with meaningless messages, they want personalised promotions or moment marketing that adds something to their day. CRM, coupled with geo-located messages, could create the most powerful personalised mobile campaigns yet

Maria Grant, Oxygen8 Group

Primark time

We all spoke too soon when Primark announced it would not be pursuing ecommerce, as trialling products through Asos is super smart. Primark is taking advantage of a highly established platform already in place with an already doting audience that plays right into Primark’s hands. Asos and Primark are the perfect match.

Distributing through a large site that’s already hugely successful with Primark’s target audience, means the retailer is not required to invest in developing ecommerce platforms and furthermore, spend time creating engagement from scratch with its target customers. What will Primark do next?

Peter Veash, CEO, The BIO Agency

Ivory towers or silos?

Marc Mathieu’s article ‘The ivory tower of marketing will fall in a connected world’ raises the issue of the difference between marketing and sales.

Look in the dictionary and marketing means selling. But many large organisations have both marketing and sales departments.

The adages ‘People buy people first and product second’ and ‘They could sell snow to Eskimos’ give credence to the conclusion that all good salespeople are good marketers but not all good marketers are good salespeople.

Marc is right when he says that marketing, sales and after-sales should get cosy, but is wrong to say digital has led to this necessity. They should have been doing this since the Stone Age.

All digital has done is create another shopping mall. The sooner people stop over- analysing the digital revolution the sooner marketers will re-embrace the basic tenets of marketing and start selling again.

David Brown, Silverkettle Marketing

Blackberry and blues

I both disagree and agree with BlackBerry’s Frank Boulben on the overuse of celebrities to build brands. 

Over 100m sales of George Foreman’s Lean Mean Grilling Machine since 1994 prove the straight-to-camera celebrity pitch can sell. Similarly, Rafael Nadal has helped get 900,000 Facebook likes for Bacardi’s ‘Champions Drink Responsibly’ campaign.

But Boulben is right to look for something “authentic”. Black-Berry’s use of singer Alicia Keys as global creative director is a good fit between celebrity, brand and customer.

Analysis by Roger Ingham of DataAlive has shown the success in the IPA Effectiveness Awards of celebrity campaigns is 67 per cent, compared with 45 per cent in non-celebrity cases.

That’s quite a return.

Hamish Pringle, 23red