given Apple’s habit of creating a bang, the latest gossip doing the rounds is the launch of iPhone 2.0. Forget about company sponsored leaks, the way apple news spreads, and conclusions derived, is all pure marketing genius. And it’s all go to do with the product’s hype value – and the obsession apple fans have for the brand.  Read more to understand the madness:

Reasons why Apple iPhone will be launched on 15th June:

1. Apple 24-hr store closed on May 29th on account of a commercial shoot. The only two times the store was shut previously was when the iPhone and OS X Leopard were launched.

2. AT&T sent all retail sales employees a no-vacation blackout memo between June 15 and July 15. Being the only carrier for iPhone 2.0, the assumption is valid that its all thanks to the launch. The same thing happened when iPhone was originally launched.

3. This is the weirdest. Fortune published a report on a major spike in Ocean Containers labeled "electric computers" by Apple. This is direclty being refered to the 3G-enabled iPhone 2.0 that has apparently been shipped from Apple’s two major Asian suppliers!

Compared to all other brands who love to leak stories, in Apple’s case, the non-leak formula seems to be the most effective!

Stay glued to your PC on the 15th! Love it or hate it, you want to know what’s next as far as Apple is concerned!

So I was going through Seth Godins’ blog (author of business books and a popular speaker.) and I came across this post (what do you know) of his where he writes about a bunch of things every good marketer should know. Thought it would be a good idea to share it on here.

1. Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
2. Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
3. Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.
4. Share of wallet is easier, more profitable and ultimately more effective a measure than share of market.
5. Marketing begins before the product is created.
6. Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.
7. Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency.
8. Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.
9. Products that are remarkable get talked about.
10. Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your returns policy.
11. You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.
12. If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.
13. People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
14. You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.
15. What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.
16. Business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy.
17. Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based RSS information, consumer fan clubs) are quickly proving how well they work.
18. People all over the world and of every income level, respond to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants.
19. Good marketers tell a story.
20. People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
21. Marketing that works is marketing that people choose to notice.
22. Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to.
23. Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.
24. A product for everyone rarely reaches much of anyone.
25. Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in an conversation-rich world.
26. Marketers are responsible for the side effects their products cause.
27. Reminding the consumer of a story they know and trust is a powerful shortcut.
28. Good marketer’s measure.
29. Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you’re done.
30. One disappointed customer is worth ten delighted ones.
31. In the Google world, the best in the world wins more often, and wins more.
32. Most marketers create good enough and then quit. Greatest beats good enough every time.
33. There are more rich people than ever before, and they demand to be treated differently.
34. Organizations that manage to deal directly with their end users have an asset for the future.
35. You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.
36. You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support and you market every time you send a memo.
37. Blogging makes you a better marketer because it teaches you humility in your writing.

Having read all of this what struck me is that it’s all so simple! and yet alot of these facts get overlooked only too easily. There is always room to learn more and more each day, but learning matters only when you put what you have learned to use.This is but a chip of the iceberg, feel free to add on.

Problem one: There’s too much information is on the web..not really your storybook where you know the  quantum of content already.

Problem 2: Our brain processes visual information faster when viewing (what we mostly do on the web..esp with ads) as compared to reading.

This is where the challenge lies – creating impact as well as depth for this 5-seconds audience.. It automatically makes it more challenging to create a web advert as compared to a print or TV one.

Recent research conducted by the University of Vienna shows just how fast people process visual information.

Results:
Subjects could register content in less than 1/100th of a second.

Within 1/20th of a second subjects had already started to interpret style.

All this happening before recognition of the whole object.

Simply put, our art directors and web designers need to do some serious rethinking of their creative concepts and the media planner need to reconsider the time and placement of banner adverts and such else…lest we lose the fellow to a different ad!

Food for thought?

Of course, we all know that or at least claim to. A nielsen survey below is a good reference point.

According to the above data, if you really want to do word-of-mouth marketing well, you’re better off investing your attention on the boring stuff, like product performance, employee training, quality, and especially customer service.

Umm..do I hear dissent brewing…?

****UPDATE****

Guess the brands are listening in!

Product innovation back on the agenda at unilever

By Influx Insights – posted by Ed Cotton

At a time when product performance now trumps marketing spin, Unilever’s Chairman is looking for more product innovation from the giant multinational.

According to an interview in the Times of London.

“Michael Treschow thinks there is not enough “wow” at Unilever.

The Swedish chairman likes inventions, gadgets and new whizz-bang things. He has been in his job for a year and, after a shake-up and streamlining of the top team at the Anglo-Dutch food and soap company, he wants the men in white coats to work faster, creating an assembly line of new products.

The marketing is good, the selling is good, it’s the product line that needs attention, he says. “The single most important thing is that we speed up our innovation machine, which means that we bring more highly appreciated products to the consumer so that they say, ‘Wow, this is really something I would like to have’,” he says.”

Can we now expect increases in R&D spends as packaged goods companies go back in search of product performance and difference?

The following ad is designed by Contract Advertising, Mumbai. I do not yet know if it has been published, but just reading it is heart breaking.

While its easy to say that most papers won’t have the guts to publish something so “in-your-face”, the truth is that this is what reality looks like. And reality bites.

Prison Break is a popular TV show, and the makers recently ran an interesting campaign to promote it in New Zealand.

Colenso BBDO, Auckland advertised prison break by placing special bars of soap in public restrooms all over new Zealand. On one side there was a key-imprint, and on the other the shows details.

Photographer: Stephen Roke
Creative Director: Steve Cochran
Copywriter & Art Director team: Jonathan McMahon and Lisa Fedyszyn
Agency Producer: Jo Kouvaris
Account Director: Katrina Ingham
Account Manager: Lucy Pilkington

You thought agencies were obsessed with awards? Think again!

Fallon is moving offices and melting down its many awards to create a “We Are Fallon” “metal mural,” as Agency Spy puts it.

Now it’s getting its YouTube on with the “Pat Fallon’s Goodbye Speech” video posted above where he’s bidding farewell to the trophies on their way to the smelter. For all who wish to contribute, there’s a Web site where one can donate that spare Clio that’s lying around. So far, 89 people have contributed, including Pat Fallon himself.

Pat Fallon’s Goodbye Speech