Marketing Trends

Eric Siu likes to say he was never successful athletically. And while he might have struggled between the lines, there was one arena in which he thrived: the digital one. Eric always found comfort when it came to video games, where for years,  he dominated as a successful esports player. For Eric, success in gaming was rooted in the mindset that failure was his and his alone, but that regardless o...

If you’ve ever flipped on an NBA game in the last few years, you’ve probably noticed one small little detail embroidered on the left shoulder of your favorite NBA superstar. A logo. Sponsorship opportunities are plentiful in professional sports, and the relationship between a team and the community in which it plays is a critical aspect to take into account when it comes to their jersey patches an...

Here’s the deal, customer service gets a bad rap, but the truth is that when done well, solving customers’ needs is awesome, and when you can actually give them a good experience and make their day, that’s just icing on the cake. Reaching that outcome takes work, though, and the market for how customer service outsourcing is conducted has been changing over the last few years.  Companies such as A...

More than likely you’ve come across your favorite YouTuber dropping their favorite line, “this episode is sponsored by [Insert brand name here].” And while that tag might be an annoying sidetrack to the content you came for, there is something bigger at play with that message than what you see and hear on the surface, especially to the marketers who set up that sponsorship.  “The feel of your bran...

Jonathan Yaffe is not joking when he says our economy is changing. No, he isn’t talking about the rise and fall of the stock market or the way consumers distribute their money. What he is talking about is a culture shift, from a things economy to one focused on experiences. Jonathan knows this because he saw it shift first-hand during his days with Red Bull, where he learned the power of experienc...

Matt Epstein was three years removed from his days at UCF when he decided he’d finally had enough of the job-hunting process. Endlessly sending out resumes without as much as a response had worn him down and he had to take a hard look at why, as a marketer, he couldn’t make himself stand out. marketer,  So he changed his strategy and instead of doing what everyone wanted him to do, he pivoted and...

Ushering a company through a rebrand is a daunting enough task. Now try walking that tight-rope when your company is pivoting from a non-profit impact-driven organization to a for-profit company focused on making sure its clients receive accurate data to power their A.I. Sounds challenging, right? A.I. has become something of a buzzword in marketing circles, the technology has merits if you unders...

In her years of experience as a marketing analyst and advisor to the C-Suite, Erna Alfred Liousas has worked with businesses of all sizes. From small SMBs to large enterprises, she’s seen it all. And it’s through these interactions with marketing departments of all sizes that she found clarity on all the areas where marketers are struggling most, including where a marketing team is most-frequently...

2020 proved to be one of the most unprecedented and unpredictable years in history. Forevermore, marketing students will study the way brands altered campaigns at moments notice, embraced new technology, and dealt with social challenges as they surfaced. And they will also study the fallout and response to all of those activities in the years that followed, especially as it relates to marketing in...

There’s nothing more frustrating than putting hours of time and money into a project only to watch it lay dormant. And yet, we see this happening constantly with brand landing pages and websites — the online face of the company — left neglected and forgotten for long stretches. So how can marketers break the mold and turn their websites into a long-lasting and user-friendly experience? That’s a qu...

The saying, “cash is king,” might have finally met its match in 2020. As more and more businesses and banks push their business toward eCommerce and digital transactions, the result is the further shunning of physical cash., One CMO is hoping to cash in on that trend, if you will, by capitalizing on every single swipe of the credit card thanks to a little help from A.I. “We thought, what if we use...

Let's get into some marketing 101: Every marketer has some kind of base they market their products to. For example, if you’re in the market for a tire, Goodyear is probably on your radar. At Adobe, the marketing team attempts to appeal to customers who want to tap into their inner creative side. But what happens when you don’t have a defined customer base? What if your customer base is literally a...

Joel Windels , the CMO of NetMotion , says if you’re working on building the ultimate customer experience, you should shift your mindset and instead look at it as an overall consumer experience. The difference is subtle, but the applications and implication of that mental move are necessary in a world where buying something goes far beyond just the basic transaction.    “The quickest way to descri...

Never before have consumer expectations shifted at such a rapid pace. As brands and marketers try to keep up with an always-evolving consumer landscape, what they are quickly discovering is that just because you operate in one sector, doesn’t mean you are just being judged amongst your peers. As the  Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing, Product and Digital Officer at City National Bank ,...

It’s no secret that the power of a brand can make all the difference in the world of marketing. When people think of Apple, they think of clean, sleek and innovative designs. When you think of Wendy’s, its smart and clever Twitter account has become the high water mark for how brands should interact with their base. But what happens when you’re a smaller brand still building your message? How do y...

Tim Glomb has never been one for doing things the “traditional way.” From his days producing reality television shows, to his current gig as the Vice President of Content and Data for Cheetah Digital , Tim has consistently operated under one founding principle: To create content that makes people say, “‘That was awesome.” “You want to know if your content is resonating. Yeah, jumping out of a plan...

Perhaps the Cookie Monster said it best when he uttered the phrase, “Cookie not diet, because Cookie is Lifestyle.” For Tom Carusona, the CMO of Insomnia Cookies , that mantra has never been more true. But after more than two years as the head marketer for Insomnia Cookies, he’s learned one key lesson… “From a content perspective, authentic cookie shots are what people want. They want to see a war...

When we’re wandering around the internet, the hard truth is that we are constantly at risk. There are bad actors constantly attempting to perpetrate cyberattacks on unsuspecting web surfers. And, more and more often, those bad actors are utilizing some pretty sophisticated marketing tactics and we don’t even realize it. Matt Gillis , the CEO of Clean.io , says it’s time to change that mindset. “Mo...

When your company is 113 years old, internationally known, and well respected, you would think by now everything has been figured out. Turns out, though, that even the biggest legacy companies in the world have room to grow and lessons to learn. “We found that at UPS, we had tons of data. We were swimming in data. [Shipping] traditionally has been an industrial, engineering, and operating company....

The core goals for any marketing department revolves around the customer experience. But when you think about the customer journey, what is the difference between the marketing of a product and the experience of the product itself, and how should each of those blend together?  “When you think about the customer experience, it's hard to tell whether it's part of the marketing experience or the actu...

In a world driven by content, the B2B space is no exception. That fact, according to  Farnaz Maters , the Executive Director and CMO for Principal Global Investors, means that grabbing someone's attention is more difficult now than ever before, and it’s a marketer's job to create things that rise to the top in the sea of content. “Where we are in B2B, it’s basically a content war. It's about havin...

Every marketer is looking for that magic channel. The one space where it feels like everything resonates perfectly with your audience and your message cuts through the noise. More often than not, though, finding a hybrid, thought-out, multichannel approach is the true secret formula for success. “I won't say that there's an individual channel that works really well. What I will tell you is that we...

When it comes to marketing in 2020, Marty Kihn, the Senior Vice President of Strategy for Salesforce Marketing Cloud said it best: “This was both a cultural shift and a consumer behavior shift, then also an economic shift. Advertisers had to react to all those changes in consumer behavior, the channels that people were consuming ads on, and then the economic pain behind the scenes, which affects a...

When you’re selling something to someone online, the name of the game is ease of sale. You never want to make the transaction hard, just like you never want to make it tough for a customer or potential customer to find you. So how do you create a frictionless experience from search to final sale? The answer is to use data as your guiding light.  “We like to see what is being searched and then we p...

There are certain holiday traditions that just hit differently. From the old-schoolMacy’s Thanksgiving Day parade to the new-school release of the Starbucks holiday cups, these time-honored rituals have become synonymous with the holiday season. But what happens when one of those customary activities is forced to undergo a swift change? That’s what happened when UNICEF’s annual Halloween boxes wen...