marketing

June 23, 2017

Great Coffee vs. Awful Marketing

My loyalty to Peet’s Coffee is absolute. I have loved Peet’s since it was a single store in Berkeley. I told my wife in 2001 that I wouldn’t move anywhere outside the Bay Area unless there was a Peet’s nearby. That pre-qualified Santa Barbara, where we live now. When we travel to where Peets has retail stores, we buy… Continue reading

advertising, Boston, Business, marketing, new york, Personal, Santa Barbara, Technology, Travel, VRM

coffee, e-commerce, loyalty, marketing, Peets, retailing
August 3, 2016

Nobody else owns our experiences

Who Owns the Mobile Experience? is a report by Unlockd on mobile advertising in the U.K. To clarify the way toward an answer, the report adds, “mobile operators or advertisers?” The correct answer is neither. Nobody’s experience is “owned” by somebody else. True, somebody else may cause a person’s experience to happen. But causing isn’t the… Continue reading

adtech, advertising, Broadcasting, Business, Internet, News, problems, publishing, Research, Technology, VRM

ad blocking, advertising, Business, iab, marketing
April 3, 2015

On @Cluetrain, @advertising @social and #NewClues

In There Is No More Social Media — Just Advertising, Mike Proulx (@McProulx) begins, Fifteen years ago, the provocative musings of Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger set the stage for a grand era of social media marketing with the publication of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” and their vigorous declaration of “the end of business as usual.”… Continue reading

Books, Business, Cluetrain, Future, Harvard, history, Identity, Internet, marketing, Past, Social, Technology

#NewClues, #people, advertsing, Cluetrain, marketing
March 25, 2015

The most important event, ever

IIW XX, the 20th Internet Identity Workshop, comes at a critical inflection point in the history of VRM: Vendor Relationship Management, the only business movement working toward giving you both independence from the silos and walled gardens of the world; and better means for engaging with every business in the world — your way, rather… Continue reading

Business, Events, Future, Health, Ideas, Identity, Internet, IoT, marketing, VRM

advertising, APIs, Berkman Center, decentralization, iiw, IIWXX, independence, investment, liberation, marketing, PDEC, research, sales, Venture Capital, VRM
February 23, 2011

The necessity of inventions

Over on Facebook, @DonThorson and friends have been pondering the provenance of Invention is the mother of necessity. Writes Don, “… heard that once from Doc Searls – I think its an original. Seems more true everyday. (think facebook, smartphones, the internet, computers).” So I responded, Back in the ’80s, I had a half-serious list of… Continue reading

history, Technology

Don Thorson, Kim Maxwell, marketing, Racal-Vadic, Thorstein Veblen
July 23, 2010

The train goes the other way

Marketing Needs To Stop Its BS and Wake Up, the headline says. True. The bottom line: “At the end of the day, audiences have moved on and their expectations have changed. The next five years will see drastic changes in the way organizations engage with their audiences. It’s not a choice anymore. These are the… Continue reading

Blogging, Business, Cluetrain, Future, Ideas, Technology, VRM

Cluetrain, Huffington Post, Huffpo, marketing, VRM
May 14, 2010

Reputation vs. Branding

Branding has jumped the shark. The meme is stale. Worn out. Post-peak. If branding were a show on Fox, it would be cancelled next week. I can witness this trend by watching links going to three posts I made last month: Brands are Boring, Brands are Bull and The Unbearable Lightness of Branding The latest… Continue reading

Art, Business, News, Sports

brand, branding, brands, celebrity, corporates, fashion, LeBron James, marketing, Nike, Peets, Procter & Gamble, reputation, Tina Brown, Tom Ford, Toytota, USKN
December 16, 2009

Building better markets. Not just better marketing.

The comment thread in my last post was lengthened by Seth Finkelstein‘s characterization of me as “basically a PR person”. I didn’t like that, and a helpful back-and-forth between the two of us (and others) followed. In the midst of the exchange I said I would unpack some of my points in a fresh post… Continue reading

Business, Future, Journalism, VRM

“David Weinberger”, advertising, Allen Searls, Berkman, Berkman Center, blueberries, Carpenter, Chris Locke, Colette Searls, CXO, Durham, Eleanor Searls, fcc, George Washington Bridge, google, Göteburg, Hodskins Simone & Searls, Malmö, marketing, Mom, Palo Alto, paradise, Pop, PR, projectvrm, restaurtants, Ricke Levine, Searls, Seth Finkelstein, The Searls Group, Todd Carpenter, twitter, Wanigan, WWII
July 4, 2009

The Trillion-Dollar Market

Forget financial markets for a minute, and think about the directions money moves in retail markets. While much of it moves up and down the supply chains, the first source is customers. The money that matters most is what customers spend on goods and services. Now here’s the question. Where is there more money to… Continue reading

Business, infrastructure, VRM

Chris Locke, Christopher Locke, Cluetrain, marketing, marketplace, markets, Net, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Web