Most of you will be very aware how in recent days Google and YouTube have come into significant criticism for enabling branded advertising to appear on extreme / extremist sites, as well as extreme/ist advertising to appear in turn against branded content. This includes having your ads show up on politically extremist sites like Breitbart, or otherwise having extremist and insensitive advertising show up alongside your own carefully curated branded content - for instance as a pre-roll ad on one...

I often get asked for Marketing Advice by various family members, some more than others obviously, and all understandable since I am indeed a Brand Strategist and Brand Engineer. Branding and Marketing are both a Science and an Applied Art, which means there is a golden best practice standard / model which any and all marketeers can follow / apply.

This article will hopefully set down the markers clearly, to explain the essential fundamentals of scientific marketing.

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Branding is forever a full-time and a fully 360° vocation. It’s about seeing all the angles and dealing with them in a scientific and progressive manner. As with many task-oriented disciplines, consideration is everything, and every tiny detail can make a difference.

As both a University and Advertising Industry educated Marketing and Brand Specialist, I will always put the teachings of Abraham Maslow above those of Philip Kotler. The essence of Marketing is discerning and ...

Provocateur! Agitator! Instigator! To get noticed these days you need to break outside the walls of convention, do something different to stand out. However, be aware that it’s kind of a ’Goldilocks’ exercise - meaning that if you move too far from the norm, then your typical customer won’t be able to relate to you any more and you will likely miss your mark.

So you need to be different, stand out, yet maintain your essential relevance. And most consumers these ...

Let’s face it, the world is oversaturated with marketing media - too many ads by too many brands. You cannot go anywhere without being confronted by some form of promotional message - be it a logo or device, slogan, advertisement, endorsement or product placement. It seems pretty much anything and everything has its own promotional merchandise - and the vast majority is generally overt and very in-your-face.

There is so much advertising clutter now that we just cannot process it ...

In the Econsultancy / Oracle Marketing Cloud ’Cross-Channel Marketing Report 2015’ - where the question posed was ’Which three marketing channels are the biggest priorities for your organisation over the next year? The most mentioned ended up being Website, by a clear margin (57%), then Email (48%) and Social Media (42%), with SEO (34%) and Paid Search (18%) rounding off the top 5.

There’s a strange distinction in this survey between first placed ’Website&...

I am often asked for advice on writing promotional mailings - targeted emails to be specific. I have long thought that there must be some simple formula to refer people to, and for such purposes, I have come up with the following H.O.P.P.A. acronym:

H = Hook

This is really your email subject or title, and should consist of an appealing offer or contain a promise of some degree of enlightenment if the recipient reads further. Many professional people receive 100’s...

’New and improved’, ’Transformative’, ’This changes everything’, ’Younger and more supple’... These are several phrases that are more likely to make us sit up and listen, some slightly tired now and over-used, but others which are still successful in hammering home a definitive competitive advantage for those that make use of them. Yet there are still far too many copywriters that do not take benefit from setting themselves a Neuro-Linguistic ...