Blog by S.Swaminathan

Much has been written about the power of blogs and its power to shape customer opinion. Measuring the business impact of blogs is an area of great interest to me. Some key questions I often ask myself are:

• Is blogging an island without too many inhabitants - Is it a niche waiting to get mainstream?
• Do...

This will be my last post for the year 2006.

It's the right time to reflect on how advertising will have to adapt itself for the 2007 customer. NY Times has an article  that captures the essence of what it will look like and what marketers have to get ready for:

CONSUMERS WITH A CONSCIENCE

Consu...

Offlate I have been observing the "entry by invitation only" bug that has hit a lot of  web service sites. It seems to be cool to do it on the web now! I had this experience just a few seconds back at profitlinker. I think someone has to call the bluff. I find it very unfriendly as I ...

Warc reports:

Web search giant Google says its foray into US newspaper advertising has proved a bigger-than-expected success and will be rolled out during the next few months.

The company began a trial of the service early last month , selling space in more than 60 top titles via online auctions. Up ...

Toyota, Sweden has built a fantastic site.

http://demo.northkingdom.com/ihuvudetpatoyota/index_en.html

I think the asthetics of the design is just brilliant. I do have one reservation. After having created such a 'welcoming' home page, the pages linking the other pages could have been a lot more inte...

What do Southwest Airlines, Starbucks and Wachovia Bank have in common? They all evoke positive feelings from their customers. They know how to create an experience that creates loyal customers. Great customer experience isn’t unique to an industry. It’s driven by putting your customers first. The p...

Eric Friedman has an excellent post on how sees the future of advertising. I can't agree with him more. With the increasing number of devices that we have come to own as consumers, advertising is  increasingly changing to 'discovering' and 'informing' continously, one customer at a time. Take a...

When you understand what your customer motivations are and appeal to them, even years later the communication piece can still remain a classic.

Martin Conroy's letter is one of them. He wrote a famous subscription letter for WSJ.  It was not an ad or a TVC but a two page letter! NY Times reporte...

Greg pointed me to an excellent video on "An Economic Response To Unsolicited Communication" by Marshall Van Alstyne about e-mail spam. While this is about email spam, I believe this has profund implications on:

• How to build a next generation list marketing company
• How the marketing in the f...

Consumer generated chatter is increasingly becoming an important source of purchasing decisions.