Filed under: Business Models | Tags: auto industry, customer value, public relations
More than ever before brands are built on trust, not image. Trust is an emotional state, founded not just on the products but on the integrity of companies that produce them, and the CEOs who lead them. In a consumer-driven marketplace, where public trust has been rocked by numerous incidents of corporate greed and situational ethics in a brutal economic recession, even seemingly invincible brands have become volatile.
A recent episode with Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines provides another glaring example illustrating that in today’s business landscape the customer rules, whether right or wrong. I’m not saying Smith is wrong, but I don’t think he was totally right either. There was a fair amount of media exploitation going on.
What he did was launch a Twitter tirade after being asked to leave a flight from Oakland to Burbank last Saturday, because his over-sized body was supposedly too large to fit in the seat and he was infringing on the space of the person next to him, as well as creating a safety threat — at least that’s how it was rationalized by the pilot and crew.
Filed under: Marketing Theory | Tags: advertising, commercials, super bowl
And the winner in the Super Bowl advertising competition was… everyone and no one.
As usual, there was a lot of media buzz about which were the best ads to show during the Big Game. The consensus appears to be that none of this year’s advertising crop was astounding, though many of the ads were deemed effective by different outlets using different criteria. This is the part I always find most interesting: How do we measure the effectiveness of mass media advertising in general, and more specifically during the Super Bowl where a 30-second spot costs around $2.5 million, plus production? I guess it depends on what it is we’re trying to measure.
Okay, I get that Google has changed the world and the way business is done, and their leading-edge apps are leveling the playing field for smaller companies; but, if they’re going to employ traditional media to market those apps, they might want to bring in someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s an embarrassment, or it should be. Either they don’t realize this, or they’ve become too arrogant to care.
