The anatomy of an ad: Hotel Hassler Roma
I haven’t critiqued one of these in a while, but as I was flicking through the current edition of Conde Nast Traveller, I saw this advertisement for Hotel Hassler Roma. Apparently, to market a luxury hotel experience these days, all you need is an anonymous rooftop view with what is effectively a fancy sun lounger…
A Step-by-Step Guide to Target Audience Research: Part 2
This is a continuation of a two-part series we started a few weeks ago on target audience research. Customer research is essential for understanding your target audience on a deeper level, enabling you to uncover insights about their preferences, behaviors, needs, and aspirations. This understanding helps you create effective marketing strategies, deliver more personalized experiences,…
How to choose a brand name for my business
What’s in a name? Mercedes was named after the daughter of a business partner. Acclaimed make-up artist Charlotte Tilbury is the face and name of her beauty brand. Cisco is a derivative of the city of San Francisco, where the company originated from. Spotify is a made-up, portmanteau word combining ‘spot’ and ‘identity’. Unsurprisingly perhaps,…
Just do it in the Metaverse
I consider Nike’s advertising best in class. There are very few brands capable of capturing the public mood in their advertising as successfully as the Nike brand. Tapping into sub-cultures, market-specific zeitgeist and culturally significant moments with authenticity, has allowed the brand to earn its place in the hearts and minds of generations of consumers….
A step-by-step guide to target audience research: Part One
Two of the toughest decisions you’ll experience as a seller is deciding your merchandise selection, followed by identifying your target audience. When unified, these two components unlock the path to business growth, bringing focus to your sales and marketing activity. Rather than casting the net wide, you can narrow your activities to align with a…
Applying a ‘Test and Learn’ approach to Marketing
For every marketing team, experimentation is essential to understanding the efficacy of our marketing. The concept of ‘test and learn’—the process of conducting various experiments you can monitor, measure, and evaluate—helps create the data insights necessary to make decisions about where and how we spend our marketing dollars. Sometimes, there’s a misconception that test and…
My non-fiction travel reading list
Like most people who are time poor, I find travel offers the perfect opportunity to decompress with dedicated reading time. Admittedly, I struggle to make a dent in what is increasingly becoming a long list of business-focused books, and when you pepper-in fictional narrative for balance, the list becomes even longer. But I do love…
In pursuit of an ‘ideal-self’ and what this means for brands
As marketers, we relentlessly focus on putting forward the best public image of the brands we represent. We attempt to attract consumers by pitching the virtues of an ideal, must-have solution that taps in to vulnerabilities. We pitch products as the be-all, end-all answer to our needs… the ideal tech gadget, the ideal job, the…
Can a luxury fashion brand be sustainable?
Last weekend I watched a documentary film called Fashion Reimagined. It’s been occupying a lot of my headspace this week for being fascinating, informative, and terrifying in equal measures. Fascinating because it gave me a front-row seat into the inner workings of an industry I don’t have first-hand experience. Informative for providing insight into what…
Does Influencer Marketing Still Matter?
Think about it. Think back to the last substantial purchase you made online. If I was a betting man, I would probably say you read through a handful of reviews, maybe watched an unboxing haul video or two, scoured the net for user-generated content, and most definitely searched for specific hashtags across social. I’m pretty…