Fortis shareholder has no shame

The situation is something like this: Not even that many months ago, the Belgian financial multinational Fortis had some megalomaniac desire to buy the – far too large- Dutch financial multinational ABN AMRO. The Belgians made a deal with the Royal Bank of Scotland and the
Spanish Banco Santander, who both bought different parts of the [...]

Philip Kotler, a very misunderstood man

I started this post with a small lie, but that’s okay in marketing. Be honoust; would you have read this piece of writing had I called it ‘Jerome McCarthy, a misunderstood man’? No of course not. Mccarthy was the man that introduced the ‘four p’s of marketing’and Kotler was the one that ran of with [...]

Watching tv does not influence your behaviour?

Whenever it’s convenient, advertisers and agencies make the claim that ‘advertising does not influence your behaviour, it merely influences your preferences’. This is convenient when it comes to stuff like ‘tobacco’ and ‘alcohol’. On the other hand, no agency has any problem in telling a potential client that their campaign will drive consumers to their [...]

Lidl is cheap

That’s the actual pay-off of the Lidl supermarket: ‘Lidl is cheap’. and when looking at the yellow and blue logo, all the boxes in the places where there should be shelves and the tiles on the floors, you know it’s true. This is one cheap supermarket. But in the case of Lidl, that might not [...]

Taxes benefit the entrepeneur

Populist politicians and dumb authors generally oversimplify matters. Like: we should cut taxes to stimulate entrepreneurship and reduce the governmental burden on businesses. Taxes are there to keep those nasty left-wing treehuggers happy. As the more intelligent reader will recognize: the truth is actually quite different.
First of all, it is important to realize (as populists [...]

When was the last time Coke did something cool?

‘Creating a hype’ has been much more than a hype itself among the big multinational consumer brands. Almost every marketer is looking for ways to create a big hype around it’s brand. Whisper campaigns, guerrilla marketing, brand buzzing what have you not in the idiom of the A-list marketeer? In the mean time, the biggest [...]

Dare to be the same as everyone else

I do not necessarily hate the automotive industry. Nor do I have a personal vendetta against advertising people. Hey, I even wrote something nice about the good people at Ford some time ago. But, somehow, advertising brings out the worst in everybody (like people that have had to witness the Fortis adcampaign-disaster surely have noticed…)
As [...]

You are a thief… and a liar.

On the Cultblender blog I recently wrote about how workers that have internet access on average spend five and a half hours on personal things. This was investigated by researching accountants at E&Y who are probably jealous of those other people that actually have a personal life and to put insult to shame; the named [...]

B2B is alive and kicking

On the cover of an advertising magazine I read an article about an art director who said he was really tired of people still talking about ‘business-to-business’ (B2B). I can only assume that with B2B he only means ‘B2B marketing’, most advertising creatives rarely think beyond marketing when talking about companies. In his opinion, B2B [...]