Super Bowl XLVIII 2014 advertisements are already generating a lot of buzz in social media and advertising industry media, with more to come during and after this weekend’s game. My pre-game wager for the ad that will have the most impact goes on Intuit. Rather than using millions of dollars to communicate about Intuit, the strategically smart software publisher of QuickBooks and TurboTax is using its investment to help its small business customers. Intuit demonstrates co: collective’s storydoing (versus storytelling) at its best. (Read my earlier review of Ty Montague’s True Story book and storydoing as a strategy.) Intuit ran a contest inviting small businesses to tell their story and get their fan base to vote for them. Businesses were then asked to demonstrate they could handle the bump up in traffic from winning. Twenty companies (out of thousands) made it to the…
Smarter marketing requires more than personalized messages
I feel overwhelmed by the volume of digital messages coming at me from all corners of my life. And I am not alone. My 2013 prediction is that value is about to rapidly migrate once again in technology markets. Over the holidays I met a young woman in her 30s — a former boutique owner who now works at a leading retailer — who told me that she stopped using Facebook when she realized the postings kept growing in number and falling in sincerity. Also, she’s “unsubscribed” from retailers she buys from, finding that their recommendations based on past purchases more often insult rather than reflect her taste. She is tuning out to digital messaging much as I ignore the ads in newspapers to make my newspaper reading more efficient. Perhaps my message overload problem was not age-related, I thought leaving our conversation….