We are officially launching this blog, and as is customary in the blog-o-sphere, we thought we would take a few minutes to give readers a sense of the blog’s focus, differentiation, contributors and agenda.
What is the focus of this blog?
This blog is focused on the topics of brands, marketing, innovation and technology – separately and together, in parallel and as they collide … and one of the firm beliefs of the folks behind this blog is that they ARE colliding. This is requiring brand and marketing leaders to retool, but it also means that those developing new innovation and technology – especially software companies – need to retool. A revolution is coming!
The blog’s content captures changing views of how to effectively ‘propel’ brands in the marketplace and how to measure and validate success and failure. It is also about opportunity … for brand builders and marketers to take their game(s) to the next level by embracing new approaches and new tools that are often the product of new innovation and technology.
But most of all it is meant to drive dialogue – to ‘propel’ ideas – about the future of brands, the people and companies who develop and market them and how they can gain competitive leverage through innovation and technology.
How is it different from other blogs?
There are many, many, many, many, many, many … (you get the point) blogs about each of these four topics, but there are no blogs that really capture the ‘overlap’ of all four topics or that probe the boundaries of what we know and think about this convergent domain.
As you read this blog over the coming weeks and months, you’ll ‘get’ what it is all about, but for those who follow other blogs in this space, let us identify how this blog is different. What is this blog NOT about? It is …
- NOT a ‘fuzzy-logic’ commentary on social media X.0, per se … although blogs, social networks and related technologies will be a regular topic from the prospective of their value to managing and marketing brands
- NOT just about the online world, but instead seeks to bridge online and offline brand strategies … given brands really do have a life beyond their web site
- NOT marketing technology for marketing technology’s sake … although we will talk a lot about marketing technology
- NOT an attempt to recreate BrandWeek, Brand Republic, or any of the other industry news sites/mags
- NOT a how-to guide for building a tactical lead-generation system or infrastructure
- NOT repetition of anything that your Marketing 101 professor told you but that you have since conveniently forgotten
- NOT a regurgitation of others’ blog posts
Who is writing this blog?
This blog is being primarily written, produced and moderated by Adam Needles and Christine Needles – two professionals who are brand builders, marketers and communicators, who work in the technology industry and who also are passionate about integrating innovation and technology into the practice of brand building, marketing and communication.
Over time, our vision is to invite other thought leaders to contribute their own insights and to expand this overall dialogue.
But we believe it is most important to hear from you, the reader. Please comment on what you see here, if it stirs your thoughts, and let us know if you would like to join the site as a regular contributor.
What can you expect on the horizon?
We hope that the topics and issues will be evolutionary; however, we also realize it’s important to get conversation started. So we have brainstormed some initial topics for upcoming posts:
- Balancing online brand monitoring with the offline world
- Bridging the marketing ‘digital divide’ between industries that are technologically sophisticated and those that remain in the low-tech/no-tech universe and finding a middle ground
- Developing nimble marketing technology infrastructure via service-oriented architecture and software-as-as-service platforms
- Finding your next-generation integrated marketing services agency
- Nesting effective mobile marketing strategies and campaigns in a larger effort to capture value from ‘brand communities’
- Tackling ‘MRP’ – marketing resource planning – and other ways to re-think your marketing infrastructure
- Understanding how the advent of search technology changes (and sometimes doesn’t change) brand perceptions and strategy
What do you think?
Let us know what is on your mind and where we can focus our dialogue.
Looking forward to learning from/through this blog…especially since my organization still views blogging, social networking, online videos, etc… as a major marketing “stretch goals” (a la ‘Sounds cool, don’t know much about it, not sure how it fits into an overall plan/strategy, will get around to it when I have a few spare days’).
@Kirsten – I appreciate the comment. We’re hoping that a key benefit of this blog will be better tying together the ‘online’ and the ‘offline’ marketing worlds … including bringing new-marketing concepts, including social media, user-generated content and co-creation to folks in traditional industries.
It is such an eye-opener. I am so surprised and impressed by the authors’ innovative thinking on the “overlap” area of the 4 most crucial topics of today and future business, and by their passion and dedication to raising the strategic marketing to a higher level.
Brand and Marketing have been the core of business strategic thoughs for decades. Later, Innovation became the hottest topic in the board meetings of many business giants as the approach to gain the competitive edge in market. Meanwhile, Technology especially IT has changed our life and the business operation. I fully agree with you that the integrated force of these aspects will be the key driver shaping the future business world.
Looking forward to reading and learning from this blog. Great initiative, and Insightful thoughts!
@ Jeffrey – Glad to see you embrace our thinking here. And I believe you are right. We’ve added smart software and IT to every part of the enterprise at a strategic level … except marketing. Software and IT for marketing continues to operate in the tactical trenches. Marrying these concepts at a strategic level is critical. That’s the type of dialogue we want to drive here!