When I journeyed to Coca-Cola HQ in Atlanta, Georgia, to meet the people charged with growing the world’s most famous brand (see cover story), I expected three days of self-congratulating fanfare, celebrations and bunting. It was, after all, the eve of Coca-Cola’s 125th birthday. I also expected to have to negotiate my way through a […]
Coca-Cola has revealed how it intends to double its revenue by 2020.
When Ashley Stockwell – the subject of Marketing Week’s cover story this week – was at Virgin Media, he told me that it was getting to the point where none of the broadband providers could promise perfect, uninterrupted, faultless and fast broadband all the time. He reckoned the battle in that sector over the next […]
Somewhere among its values and personality, your brand has a soul. A living, breathing organism with limitless ability to grow your business. It’s up to you as marketing director, to guard and protect that soul. At times that might mean you presenting a compelling case against a tempting commercial opportunity. In doing that tough job […]
The last time I wrote about the Marketing Week Engage Awards in this column I got into trouble with a reader named Jim. Jim responded to the online version of that column back in November when we launched the 2011 Awards, telling me that I should be ashamed of myself. He felt it was an […]
There are more than enough perspectives on social media in this issue to keep you happy if you’re one of the many that are still awaiting “the perfect answer” on how best to embrace it as a brand. Mark Ritson takes a pop at Cadbury’s Stars v Stripes campaign and its social media “failings”. Ritson […]
A leading UK marketer has warned that the discipline of marketing is becoming “lazy” in the face of “cheap social media”.
Spring has brought plenty of innovative thinking into the world of media. There are two examples this week where it appears that traditional media owners are ready to collaborate with their direct competitors in order to raise interest in their offering to advertisers. We report in this week’s magazine that newspapers are looking to provide […]
Lara O’Reilly’s story about Diet Coke’s new proposition as a “fashion brand for demanding fashionistas” made me smile and took me back to my first few days as Marketing Week editor in January 2009. First, let me say that I don’t particularly understand the new brand strategy. I’m not a ’fashionista’ by any stretch of […]
When Marketing Week columnist Mark Ritson took to the stage at one of our conferences last September to present “seven big lessons on brand management” to an audience of brand managers, he told them that targeting means two things. Identifying the segmented audience your brand wants to reach and clearly identifying all the other audiences […]
I’m not a big fan of the coalition government, but I am fully behind the proposals it unveiled last week to force cigarettes to be sold in plain, unbranded packaging. I also think pursuing the previous administration’s intention to ban the display of cigarettes in shops is absolutely the right thing to do. Just to […]
All in a day’s work: she invented interactive marketing and gave us the now-ubiquitous ’Intel Inside’ jingle, but the indefatigable Ann Lewnes is now embarking on her boldest mission yet, to bring Adobe to the world.
“One of the most persistent put-downs of the internet era is to tell somebody they ’don’t get it’. But even for those who ’do get it’, the sad truth is that getting it doesn’t come with life membership…as technology develops, you have to keep getting it again and again.” So says Michael Nutley in the […]
A university approached me this week to advise on its proposed curriculum for a new course in digital marketing that its business school wants to offer in September. An examination of the suggested modules revealed it to be fairly thorough, but I offered a couple of suggestions. One of them was to consider whether it […]
Global Ethics, owner of the One brand, has appointed former Virgin Media executive director of brand and marketing Ashley Stockwell to revamp the One brand and develop the business.