Category: branding

Friday Five: clearing the cache edition

Cleaning out some starred items from the RSS reader:

  1. Michael Stoner wonders: Who listens to podcasts, anyway? Good question. And Stoner sort of answers.
  2. A university gets possessive. Via University Business, the Boston Globe reports on Boston University President Bob Brown’s “test-driving” of a new slogan for the campus: “Boston’s University.” It sounds like Brown has convinced Globe columnist Alex Beam, anyway. The tagline “removes two of BU’s outsized competitors — Cambridge-based Harvard and MIT — from the mix entirely. Boston College, its name notwithstanding, huddles in the shady groves of Newton. Both US News & World Report and Washington Monthly rank BU well above Northeastern University, the only other claimant for the title. So ‘Boston’s University’ it is.”
  3. Facebook vs. MySpace (video). A nice parody of those Mac vs. PC TV ads, from CNET.
  4. Paging Joseph Campbell: Tired of those Internet “trolls” who crash your forums with inane or inflammatory comments? You may as well despise the court jester! Via Boing Boing comes word that the troll is nothing more than the archetypical trickster of our mythology, who enter our online discussions with “the cracked, stoic smile of Robin Goodfellow, a Puck with the simple desire to disrupt peace itself.” If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended.
  5. From the effective keywords department: ‘Distance learning’ breaks out. Bob Johnson discusses how “a relatively rare example of academic jargon moving out into common use.”

Lies and the lying marketers who tell them

I am completely dumbstruck by this account from Beyond Buzz author Lois Kelly about an occurrence just before spoke to a global company’s marketing staff.

One of the company’s marketing execs told me that some customers would be speaking before me to give the marketing team a sense of what the real customer is all about. Wow, I thought, what a great way to open the conference. Hear the real views of real customers in their own words. Fantastic.

But – unbeknownst to most of the marketing staff — these “customers” were actually actors hired by the advertising agency. As I was sitting in the green room with them, the actors let it slip to me what was really going on.

If this is how the marketing “professionals” of our major corporations act, it doesn’t bode well for the profession.

Call me Pollyanna, but I really have a hard time imagining that, in this day and age, when we hear so much talk about the importance of trust in customer relations and transparency in business practices, people are pulling these kinds of stunts. With their own marketing staff, no less.