Blog by S.Swaminathan

Fast-food giant McDonald's is rolling out mini-gyms in its U.S. restaurants to encourage children to sweat off their meals, or at least part of them.

The latest, and fourth of 20 planned, opened in Santa Ana, Calif., Monday, and features stationary bikes, monkey bars, climbing ropes and a mini baske...

The business model of financial planning is being turned on its head by the web. How about consumers themselves acting as financial planners and learning from each other! I think this is a great idea as there is so much more trust, transparency and honesty to this approach.

The web indeed can be a po...

There has been a lot of debate whether customer-centric marketing will gain ground across the world. With technology lifecycle across different countries being at different maturity levels, there is a lot speculation whether this form of marketing will gain ground across the world in a similar manne...

John Maeda has some excellent advice on how to keep things simple.  I feel there is a lot to learn for marketers from these laws. Because brands  need to develop a distinct identity, their marketing communication has to be simple & focussed yet  must only say what matters. Take a ...

Pushpa writes:

Organizations that use loyalty programs to urge customers to spend more on their products and services would do well to start off by offering an initial inducement. If you plan to reward the purchase of five items, present the program in such a way that rewards are earned when six item...

Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba write in their new book Citizen Marketers about 4 types of Citizen Marketers:

....we think there are four ways to classify user-created sites: Filters, Fanatics, Facilitators and Firecrackers. They are the 4 F's of citizen marketing.

1. Filters

The Filters are human wire...

Here's a nice little piece of post that I found which many a times my marketing friends on the client side keep asking me - "What % of my monies should I put into marketing?" Looks like we have some answers here:

Companies with $100 million in revenue or more allocate an average of 13.8% of...

Robert Young has a great post on the impact of social media on new advertising models. He writes :

.. As such, successful commercial exploitation of this new medium requires the development of new business/advertising models.³ This has been true for every other new medium that has been adopted at lar...

Vanessa has a brilliant post on the challenge for a marketer. Take a look:

...we, as inventors and marketers, are not alone - most new ideas and products are met with skepticism, met with a resistance to accept and adopt. People are reluctant to change their lifestyle, their patterns, their routines....

Brad Burnham writes :

I had a cup of coffee yesterday with Craig Newmark.Toward the end of the conversation, I told him that one of the most important things I learned by studying Craigslist was the importance of customer service.

Customer service is the new marketing because you can realize the radic...