Tybout, A. & Carpenter, G. (2001) Creating and Managing Brands

This article focuses on branding strategies, which worked successfully. But what I did miss were strategies that didn’t work. At the end of the article some examples are given when the successful strategies didn’t work to accomplish the company’s goals, but aren’t there strategies that didn’t have an impact at all?

A strategy that didn’t work so well in the Netherlands was ‘Sport 7’. If I remember correctly, the idea of ‘Sport 7’ was to monopolize all sporting events on their channel(s). If you wanted to see soccer for instance, you had to subscribe to ‘Sport 7’ and you would get soccer and all other sporting events too.

The originators really thought they had it there, the first week they even gave you a free magazine with all the upcoming sporting events. But after a real short period, ‘Sport 7’ went bankrupt and the sporting events went back to their original state.

Like I said, this article focuses a bit too much on only the successes. For instance, SBS6 learned from ‘Sport 7‘s’ mistake. SBS6’s strategy is a bit different. SBS6 is trying to get their hands on sporting evens also, but they use a cockroach approach. They are buying more and more sporting events step by step. It all started with darts, after that they bought the right to broadcast the practice matches of the Dutch national soccer team. Now they have the rights of their qualifying matches too and they broadcast ‘De Amstelcup’.

So it is possible to duplicate successes and learn from their strategies, but you can also learn a lot from mistakes and that’s the part I missed in this article.

George N. Dafermos; Blogging the market. How weblogs are turning corporate machines into real conversations

George Dafermos wrote in his article Blogging the market about blogging as potential organizational goldmine, with stories about Slashdot, Amazon, Macromedia, Groove Networks, and Gizmodo. My question is; How can I make money with this weblog?

Dafermos writes about the weblog from Andrew Sullivan, who actually makes money with it. This guy writes about books and discusses with others about these books. The money he makes comes from Amazon.com who pays him for every person who buys a book through his page. Why can’t I do that? Well, go to the next link, and buy the book. Amazon.com.

I can’t imagine money coming in. The main reason is that there are not a lot of readers at my weblog. Dafermos says you have to be an opinion maker to influence the public. So the things I have to do are; become an opinion leader by making interesting discussions, make sure a lot of people are following my blog, and make a deal with a company who uses my influence to sell their products. It’s as easy as that! Oh, one thing Dafermos says is important; it is obvious that unless the weblog is unique, it’s not going to work. There goes my plan…

Sean Nixon, re-imagining the ad agency.

Nixon says a culture within an ad agency is very important for the results. Next to the way you pay, and the way you communicate with your clients. If we consider this, is a medium ad agency better then a big one?

I think it is. In a smaller agency the changes are bigger you know all your colleges. This results in a better bond between these people. And in a smaller agency your boss is closer to you; you don’t have to go through sub-bosses. This means you have a less formal contact and this makes it more fun to work.

The way you communicate with clients is probably better as well. In a big agency changes are a client always communicates with a different staff member. This will probably get to their nerves.

I personally noticed this when I changes from working in a small hardware store to a big hardware store. Some clients prefer direct help, so they go to the smaller stores. Working in a smaller store makes it easier to remember witch clients you helped, with makes the contact more intense, and make the clients come back. In the big store I lost track of the amount of clients I made orders for. In this way, if an order didn’t come in, I wouldn’t notice. And the client gets annoyed.