Blog by S.Swaminathan

Niklas Zennström, founder and CEO of Skype Technologies has this to say( in Economist 2006's Annual):

There is now a relentless need to innovate at a pace modern customers demand. Unencumbered innovation requires speed and vigilance, and slowing down to keep an eye on the competition is a distraction...

Kao Corp., which makes Ban deodorant, is asking teenage consumers to design an advertisement that will persuade their peers to choose Ban. The Wall Street Journal( subscription required) reports on the design contest, which was publicized in fall issues of such magazines as CosmoGirl and Teen People...

Peppers & Rogers report on a SAS survey:

Measuring and adapting to customer insight is more than good strategy. It's money in the bank.

It's 25 percent more money in the bank, to be exact, according to the findings of a newly released benchmarking study, "Building the Marketing-Ready Enterpr...

Dustin Staiger writes:

I used to have a whole life insurance policy. It’s like buying a policy that you can later cash in for its determined value. Then a lot of people started advising me that term insurance was a wiser investment. Term is more like renting insurance. In the end, you have nothing to...

The globe's mightiest advertiser, Procter & Gamble, has embarked on what may in future be seen as a seminal marketing initiative.

The Cincinnati-headquartered giant this week announced plans to extend the offerings of its happy-housewifery website, Home Made Simple, to include music downloads at...

Om Malik writes:

If the regulatory/incumbent problems were not enough, here comes news that Yahoo will soon upgrade its Messenger’s dialout/dial in features to compete with SkypeIn/SkypeOut.

Essentially what this means is that Yahoo users could use their IM client to dial-in/out to old fashioned phon...

This week's interesting articles and information from the marketing world:

Have your personal care products been assessed for safety?

Mass produced Individuality

Can Traditional Creatives Thrive At Web Agencies?

Pocketcaster - New citizen reporting device

About sports, strategy and doing things different...

It is increasingly becoming apparent that Indian consumers are wanting international shopping experience and service.  And the retail market in India is growing at a hectic pace. International retailers are waiting in a queue to take a share of this pie.  AT Kearney has released a Global R...

Marketing VoX in a post mentioned that the mobile marketing association has issued the guidelines for mobile banners.

The MMA recommendations (PDF) refer to graphical banners (and 80 x 15 pixel black and white bitmap graphic), text "banners" (a two-line text ad, 12-16 characters per line) ...