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Dec 30, 2018 - 09:30 AM
While there are countless lookalike bloggy “how-to” articles on marketing, I prefer reads that take a deep dive into the nexus of marketing and society. You might find some of these takes unconventional, but they are certainly all interesting.
1. Making Content More Inclusive
https://www.helpscout.com/blog/inclusive-language/
Image credit: Helpscout
“If I have to be reminded that “cripple” isn’t a word we should be throwing around, how many instances in our ~six years of blog backlog have we used similarly careless language?”
Few company blogs are gold mines for good reads. That said, I’ve found a surprising number of useful and well-written perspectives on the blog of B2B brand Help Scout.
This straightforward read looks at the way the brand has strived for more inclusive content marketing language. It’s a simple reminder that content marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum - the words you choose say something about your brand. It’s up to you to decide what that statement will be.
2. Style Is an Algorithm
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/17/17219166/fashion-style-algorithm-amazon-echo-look
“We find ourselves in a cultural uncanny valley, unable to differentiate between things created by humans and those generated by a human-trained equation run amok. In other words, what is the product of genuine taste and what is not.”
I loved this creative deep dive by one of my favorite writers, Kyle Chayka. As brands increasingly use algorithms to make recommendations (and thus sales), it’s worthwhile to take the time to explore what this means for consumers.
The more AI drives marketing efforts, the more concerns will arise for the people who buy stuff. Brands that delve into the philosophical questions raised by this shift can better avoid the inevitable pitfalls of tech-as-salesperson.
3. Will Shoppers Really Care About Sustainability?
https://www.racked.com/2018/5/23/17377372/sustainable-clothes-marketing
“Research does show that people just decide to forget about child labor so they can buy what they want.”
Racked, a beloved resource for high-quality fashion journalism, got shuttered by parent company Vox this year. In mourning, I’ve included two articles from the publication here.
In this piece, the author poses a solution to the difficulties of marketing sustainable clothing. I suspect that even non-fashion brands will find some workable ideas here: for example, the notion that simple messages resonate more.
4. The Encoded Racist Messages of Skin Care Marketing
https://www.racked.com/2018/4/26/17253494/skin-care-racism-whiteness-beauty-neu
trogena-nivea
“The language of the Neutrogena advertisement becomes particularly alarming in a historical context in which “cleanse” and “purify” connote mass murder, involuntary sterilization, and colonial politics where human worth is assessed based on color and ethnic identity.”
My other favorite Racked piece this year looks at the beauty industry, which is analogous to but very different from the fashion industry. Again, word choice matters - this time, it’s because the language of the beauty industry often reflects the language of racism. Marketers could easily brush off such concerns as seemingly-innocuous, but in doing so, they risk alienating more consumers as time goes by.
5. To Live the Dream You Have to Schedule Time to Dream
image credit: entrepreneur.com
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/321419
“Figure out which pieces of your dream you can realize now, which pieces you may be able to realize within the next few years, and which pieces are currently science fiction — for now.”
Since my favorite marketing articles tend toward the philosophical, I couldn’t neglect to include the topic of the marketer themselves. How do the people behind brands come up with great ideas, time and again?
The word “dream” has an almost negative connotation in the fast-paced, business-focused marketing world. But Evergage co-founder Karl Wirth has a point here. Without the proper downtime for new ideas to form and cement, the creativity needed for business and marketing breakthroughs gets buried by the daily grind.
6. SuperFoods Are a Marketing Ploy
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/10/superfoods-marketing-ploy/57
3583/
“We do not eat just one food. We eat many different foods in combinations that differ from day to day; varying our food intake takes care of nutrient needs. But when marketing imperatives are at work, sellers want research to claim that their products are ‘superfoods,’ a nutritionally meaningless term.”
The Atlantic remains one of my favorite sources for fresh takes. I consider myself a skeptic, but it had never occurred to me that the superfoods craze might be grounded in clever marketing. After reading this, though, it seems all too obvious.
7. Alexa Should We Trust You?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/alexa-how-will-you-change-
us/570844/
“These and other tech corporations have grand ambitions. They want to colonize space. Not interplanetary space. Everyday space: home, office, car.”
Another great Atlantic article this year looks at the insidious marketing that made smart speakers like Alexa become ubiquitous seemingly overnight.
The author suggests that brands pushed to get these speakers into homes fast, using tactics like discounts so massive the items likely weren’t profitable. The goal wasn’t to make money on each individual speaker sold, but to create a lifestyle shift that would turn smart speakers into essential household items.
8. Whither the Weed Dealer? One “Care Provider” on What Legalization Might Do to the Black Market
“[My business] is a farm-to-table market—though I usually tell people it’s like a Whole Foods. I’m the small butcher who goes and picks out the cattle for slaughter to make sure you’re getting a product that’s fresh and approved.”
As the legalization of cannabis marches forward, there’s been a wealth of interesting articles on what it means to market a formerly black-market substance. However, I like that this article also looks at marketing in the black market itself. It profiles an unnamed NYC weed dealer who has built a Seamless-like delivery service for his product: “One of my selling, or differentiating, points is that there’s no tax on my product, and you can basically get it delivered to your door, by our drivers, no matter what time it is.”
9. How Tech is Remaking Fashion Image
https://newrepublic.com/article/148359/tech-remaking-fashion-image
“Fashion has always been built on exclusivity, but these businesses have gained valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars claiming the opposite while failing to completely execute it.”
Another Kyle Chayka piece takes a simpler and different look at the place where tech and fashion meet.
Certain marketing efforts rely on exclusion as part of their appeal. Today, exclusionist fashion brands aren’t all Chanel and Gucci: they can also be pseudo-approachable minimalist brands that aren’t as accessible as they claim.
What does it mean when the marketing efforts claim one thing, but the reality is very different? Chayka doesn’t pretend to answer this question, but he asks it in a fascinating way.
10. How a Corporation Convinced American Jews to Reach for Crisco
“Professor Rachel Gross says when holidays come around, we think about family, and what it means to be part of a particular story. And if those stories are shaped by food, and immigration, and even product placement, that's okay.”
I love looking at marketing through history, because things are so different and yet so much the same. NPR’s holiday piece on how Crisco tapped the Jewish market looks at the days of marketing before modern concepts like content marketing and influencers. Or does it?
Crisco created a cookbook for Jewish housewives to get them using the product, which is a form of content marketing if I’ve ever heard of one. And Jewish housewives and mothers then became the influencers who got families using the Crisco brand for decades. While technology might render most marketing concepts in new ways, the concepts themselves are rarely original.
Jan 08, 2019 - 04:52 AM
From Hubspot, Moz, Growth Hackers, Buzzsumo, Upcity , aHrefs, MarketingLand through SearchEngineJournal, we read so many articles from dedicated bloggers on the subject of digital marketing. I will list here (in no particular order) a few articles that proved quite intriguing and outstanding in the past year:
Social Media Posting Strategy & Organizing Your Posts
Do you ever ask yourself questions like, “Is it bad to post on Facebook multiple times in a day?”... “I am very green on Instagram. How do I get the right followers that will pay for my services?”
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this video blog was made just for you. We loved this one among other well-written articles of 2018. The writer of this article is an inspiring business and branding educator with social media expertise.
Why great brand stories aren’t just told — they’re built
Most marketers worth their salt understand the importance of storytelling in engaging audiences. However, OMD’s CEO, John Osborn argues in this article that it is no longer enough to be a great story teller. He argues that great brand stories are not told, they are built. Brands, therefore, must learn to become better story builders.
In the article, Osborn portends, “Storytelling historically meant developing creative based on cultural insights and broad audience assumptions, and then using media to blast it out. While this approach remains critical to building brands, it doesn’t allow for personalization — a critical component in today’s noisy media ecosystem.”
Want to deliver great customer experiences? Here’s what not to doIf you are seeking to improve customer experience, it seems quite logical that you should pull together a huge list of things to do. Correct. Yet, HomeAway, a vacation rental company owned by Expedia, took the exact opposite approach.
David Baekholm, the company’s SVP of Growth Marketing writes that they studied what was not working to determine what would. They identified three things that were bringing the company down:
- Irrelevant Landing Pages
- Annoying ads
- Cumbersome Checkout Process
Convince & Convert predicted trends that would define 2018 B2B marketing, some of which came to pass. Indeed, it is evident that B2B has changed over the past few years; some of these changes have been through some tough growing pains of adapting new technology.
This article is still relevant in 2019 as it gives great tips on how to embrace tech for your B2B marketing while highlighting how the customer is evolving with those technological needs.
Running a business is 80% marketing and only 20% product – By Eelco
Eelco published a puzzling article on the concept of marketing. They argue that a business is more of marketing than product – which is reasonably true. Amongst the top articles that we read in 2018 on this blog of “Indie hackers”, this one stood out.
Here are a couple other articles that were mostly read last year:
- Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself – By Michael Lynch
- From Idea to Profitable Business on the GitHub Marketplace and Slack – By Abi Noda
- How Macmillan made the World’s Biggest Coffee Morning even bigger online – By Marketing Week
- How Gymshark mastered Instagram to drive instant sales – By Marketing Week
- Mark Ritson: Leeds United’s badge u-turn reveals a brand with values – By Marketing Week
- Five Strategies for Slaying the Data Puking Dragon. – By Avinash Kaushik
- Six Nudges: Creating A Sense Of Urgency For Higher Conversions Rates! – By Avinash Kaushik
- Unsexy Fundamentals Focus: User Experiences That Print Money – By Avinash Kaushik
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