Alternative Marketing

Buzz campaign, word of mouth, viral marketing … Whatever the jargon, it all amounts to the same thing—trying to reach customers in spite of their increasing immunity to the many commercial images, messages, and sales pitches they receive every day. The many...

Approaches to Ethical Decision-making

Marketers often face questions about their marketing activities and the way in which these activities relate to their various stakeholders. Many of these questions need to be answered from an ethical perspective. Ethical theories can be divided into relativism,...

Assessing Relationship Strength

Views vary about the exact nature of relationship strength. Donaldson and O’Toole define it as ‘Both the economic ties and the social bonding of the partners: belief in the spirit of cooperation and trust … and actions taken indicate the strength of...

Authenticity

To win over increasingly savvy (and jaded) customers, many brands now strive for something generally called “authenticity.” They want to be perceived as “real.” In other words, they want to be let through the walls and filters that customers...

Brand Discovery

The conventional wisdom in marketing, design, and branding is that everything communicates in some way. Brands that give little thought to their communication, the thinking goes, must be communicating badly. How is it, then, that some brands succeed even without any...