Nutter Butter has a new video campaign that's an acid trip crossed with a horror movie. Is this any way to sell a cookie? Mark Schaefer says, "yes." The post The Nutter Butter campaign explained. Yes, this nightmare makes sense appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow ..read more

Is it a personal brand on TikTok, or is it something else? A few short observations from Mark Schaefer. The post Are you really building a personal brand on TikTok? appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow ..read more

What business are you in? That is one of the most deceptively difficult questions you’ll face. Here’s an example from my personal experience. One of my first consulting customers was a regional telecom company. This was a company run by engineers who were proud of their ability to offer the very latest technology. But when I asked customers why they valued this company, they cared nothing for the technology. They valued reliability and the fact that this company would respond to issues even in the middle of the night. My customer thought they were selling technology. However, the customer was ..read more

Pilot Ernie Meeks is one of the new influencers building trust for brands By Aaron Hassen, {grow} community member The most difficult job in marketing today is determining how to effectively connect with our customers in a fractured media landscape. Fortunately, we have informative research and experts like Ed Keller to guide us on where to turn next … and that might include a surprising crop of new influencers. Here’s a little story to set up the findings of Ed’s research. I was reading the news, and an article from The Dallas Morning News jumped out at me. The article, The new social media ..read more

This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of my blog. Crazy, right? I realize that nobody cares about an anniversary like this … I don’t even care, honestly … but I thought I would use the milestone as a teachable moment because blogging changed my life. And here is the main lesson of the milestone: To stand out in this world, you have to be known. To be known, you have to show up consistently. Consistency is more important than genius. Unfortunately, this is where most people fail. They stop and start, or perhaps they never start at all. In my Personal Branding Master Class, I show a slide ..read more

The world is going bonkers over a bombastic claim implying that AI is the doom of marketing. On a recent episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast hosted by Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput, the hosts referred to an interview of Sam Altman on a site called Our AI Journey. The interview is behind a paywall, but Paul relayed this specific quote about the doom of marketing and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Paul noted that it is unusual that Altman would comment on something so specifically. Here it is: “Oh for that (marketing) it will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strat ..read more

All over the web, I’m reading accounts about the ineffectiveness of purpose-driven marketing. Have marketers ruined everything again? The story goes like this: Companies make claims of civil service, altruism, and environmental goodness and then don’t follow up with actions. Bad actors have been in the news so much many people — especially young people — don’t trust any corporate claims any more. Now here is where it gets weird. Research shows that when your brand aligns with a consumer’s values — when you have shared meaning — it can be the highest driver of brand loyalty. So it’s not like w ..read more

A friend forwarded a post to me penned by digital superstar Neil Patel. I like and respect Neil a lot, and generally I agree with him, but in this case, I don’t — and I think his post provides a great lesson in the value of personal branding. Which works better? Today we’ll examine the business value of the personal brand versus corporate brand. Personal brand versus corporate brand Neil’s post goes through a detailed analysis of the number of followers on his personal and corporate accounts. He does his best to attribute revenue streams to his personal brand versus corporate brand, to determ ..read more

When I dress for the day, the first question that enters my head is, “I wonder how old this shirt is?” So … I’m not a shopper. But I do love studying the marketing behind shopping trends, and there is something going on right now that is blowing my mind. Temu and Shein are dominating the retail scene, seemingly coming out of nowhere. And when I say out of nowhere, Temu was founded 18 months ago and is now the most downloaded retail app in the world with 250 million customers. Shein has been around longer, but since the pandemic, it has become the number one fashion retailer in the world.  ..read more

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the most famous blog post I’ve written, and arguably one of the most well-known blog posts in marketing history. I am not one to reminisce or grow crazy over anniversaries, but publishing this post ten years ago was a unique, unexpected life experience and cultural moment worthy of explanation. Today, we’ll look at the impact of Content Shock and lessons from one of the most widely shared business blog posts in history. The idea behind the blog post It was the summer of 2013. I was on a plane to give a speech in Montreal, but I couldn’t relax because I ..read more