Category: Marketing

  • Does what we buy represent who we are?

    This week’s episode of the delightful NPR podcast “Hidden Brain,” “I Buy, Therefore I Am: How Brands Become Part Of Who We Are,” explores how the stories that companies tell about their products impact our lives and intertwine with our identities. In the podcast, host Shankar Vedantam interviews Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed about how branding…

  • Why Amazon’s house brands will win big

    On Monday, a pair of Bloomberg articles by Spencer Soper surfaced a recent Jungle Scout study arguing that Amazon’s house brands aren’t selling well. For example, in apparel, “only one percent of Amazon’s total sales account for its private label brands.” One of Soper’s articles, “Most Amazon Brands Are Duds, Not Disrupters, Study Finds,” ends in a…

  • Why Google Should buy eBay: Digital Assistant Wars

    Last week, Allison Prang reported in The Wall Street Journal that eBay, under pressure from activist investors, is planning a strategic review of its assets, including its classified ad business and StubHub, in order to “drive meaningful shareholder value.” This is code for “we want to sell off a bunch of things in order to…

  • Why direct-to-consumer (DTC) companies fail

    Three popular letters this month are DTC, which stands for “direct to consumer.” DTC is an exploding category for low consideration products that we used to buy in person at the pharmacy or grocery store. Then we got Amazon and could order online. Now, we can also go directly to the manufacturer, cutting out the…

  • Analog Pleasures in a Digital World

    At first, it was hard to appreciate the elderly woman seven rows in front of us who had a sudden coughing fit during the opening minutes of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” at a recent trip to the symphony. But as I winced through the coughing and throat clearing that sat between us and the orchestra, I…

  • The Two Failures of Gillette’s Toxic Commercial

    Blowback on Gillette’s “The Best Men Can Be” campaign against toxic masculinity, and there has been a lot, falls into two general camps: 1. Don’t you lecture me, Gillette (I’ve seen this from people across the political spectrum, albeit more stridently from the right); 2. Gillette, this ain’t gonna make Dollar Shave Club go away.…

  • Amazon’s real reason for launching “Free Dive” isn’t about ad revenue

    Late last month, the business rumor mill exploded with the story that Amazon subsidiary IMDB was to launch “Free Dive,” an ad-supported streaming video service that would be free to anybody who had an Amazon Fire TV device. Free Dive would be distinct from Amazon’s mostly ad-free Prime Video on Demand service because no Amazon…

  • The half-life of brands: Amazon’s algorithmic strategy

    Although what comes next will offend generations of power-mad English teachers, red-pen-wielding copy editors, and Spelling Bee conquistadores, these days most people don’t need to learn how to spell. Spellcheck saves us from having to do work that we don’t care about and that we don’t have time to do anyway. Plus, more and more…

  • The Fall and Rise of the Visual Internet

    I’m pleased to announce that my role with the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg has expanded, and I’m now the Chief Strategy Officer. This column is cross-posted from the Center’s website, and is the first of many regular pieces from me and my colleagues. And now, onto the column…  Bennett and I…

  • Delight and paradox in Jeff Rosenblum’s book ‘Friction’

    I’m delighted to share my first byline with The Drum, which is a review of “Friction” by my friends Jeff Rosenblum and Jordan Berg. Here are the first few paragraphs: Reading most business books is like watching the movie Groundhog Day, just without the funny bits. Such books bludgeon their readers with a single idea…