A few weeks ago, we published the first in a series of papers looking at some of the meaty issues facing marketers today.   Each paper was first presented at our 25th Anniversary conference in London in June 2011:  ‘Back to the future of branding - A look at what the past 25 years of brand marketing tell us about what the next 25 may have in store’. 

Our aim was to encourage new thinking, make a few predictions and perhaps even challenge some of today’s orthodoxies.  We wanted to show that we remain as committed as ever to helping our clients out-think, out-compete and out-perform their competition.

For those of you who weren’t able to attend the conference, I’m delighted to present the second
of our anniversary papers, entitled ‘Variations On The Role & Measurement of Brand’.

Co-authored by Sony Ericsson’s Nigel Turner and The Value Engineers’ Paul Durrant, the paper examines how marketers can provide consistent brand cues to help people navigate the exploding universe of mobile technology, while measuring the effect of their activities with discrete, purpose-built tools.

We hope you enjoy it.  If you’d like to discuss any of the issues raised in the paper, why not submit a comment below, or get in touch with us directly?

• “What can be measured and manipulated statistically is not only seen as real; it comes to be seen as the only or whole reality” – David Boyle: The Tyranny of Numbers
• “We look – however uneasily – for ways to quantify quality” – Jeremy Bullmore
• “When you are a bear of very little brain, and think of Things, you sometimes find that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out in the open and has other people looking at it” – Winnie the Pooh
• “Too often we measure everything and understand nothing. The three most important things you need to measure in a business are customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and cash flow” – Jack Welch
•  ”The rise of word-of-mouth and buzz marketing couldn’t come at a better time – or a worse one…it is enormously difficult to quantify return on investment from this most ephemeral of media” – Catharine Taylor

Borrowed with pride from all over the place

• “What can be measured and manipulated statistically is not only seen as real; it comes to be seen as the only or whole reality” – David Boyle: The Tyranny of Numbers
• “We look – however uneasily – for ways to quantify quality” – Jeremy Bullmore
• “When you are a bear of very little brain, and think of Things, you sometimes find that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out in the open and has other people looking at it!” – Winnie the Pooh
• “Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom” –  Clifford Stoll
• “The life-cycle of a brand is dependent upon its ability to continue to satisfy in the quantity that makes it viable to continue its production, supply” – Anon

1. “It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision to which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible.” (Aristotle)

2. “By concentrating on precision, one arrives at technique, but by concentrating on technique one does not arrive at precision.” (Bruno Walter)

3. “A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” (Vladimir Nabokov)

4. “The most important rule is to formulate, clearly and precisely, the goal to be reached, and then to retain it unswervingly in mind throughout all the stages of the execution, which are often long and complex.” (Roberto Assagioli)

5. “The weaker the data available upon which to base one’s conclusion, the greater the precision which should be quoted in order to give the data authenticity.” (Norman R. Augustine)

Borrowed with pride from all over the place.