Am taking a break in the beautiful state of Melbourne in Australia for the next week or so with my wife and kid. Our itinerary is likely to have lots of koalas, kangaroos, wombats, penguins and all things child friendly. Have a great week all!
Off to Melbourne!
From London With Love
Came across this brilliant post by CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide Kevin Roberts. Apparently, the Museum of London (yeah its a museum folks) is using Google Earth to create a Love Map of the city. According to Kevin,
“You register, locate a place on the map (like all Google-style maps it zooms in from a bird’s eye position to close-ups of houses and streets) and place a virtual pin on it. With your pin you get the opportunity to add a personal story connected with that place…”
Apparently, lots of people have already started populating the map with their personal tales of romance, kinship, historical encounters, and other recollections. In a way, this becomes a clever way of linking a place to the population. The end result is stronger community bonds and rootedness to a location, and of course more love.
Would be a great idea to do this in Singapore. In fact, we already have a champion for this area. Now, all it takes is to expand it to personal stories.
An EX-traordinary Ad
See the bus stop ad above? It is part of the highly successful Yellow Ribbon campaign organised by a whole host of different agencies and NGOs, which aim to integrate ex offenders back into society. I remembered watching the TV commercial which was rather emotional and heartwarming.
What caught my attention was the bold black headline:
Sharpen Your PR Pencils!
Uber marketing guru Professor Philip Kotler
I had the fortune of attending a recent conference featuring one of the world’s top management guru Philip Kotler. Apparently, he is a museum fan too and may feature the National Museum of Singapore in his next book. Woo hoo!
At the lecture, Professor Kotler shared about the rising importance of PR versus advertising and gave us a new acronym – PENCILS – in which to desribe the dimensions of PR. What does it mean?
Chief Marketing Officers Wanted
In the recent “Marketing for Results” conference which I attended graced by Professor Philip Kotler, he highlighted the importance of a new position – the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) – in organisations. In certain companies, this role is equivalent to the almighty Chief Financial Officer (CFO) who usually sits next to the CEO in any organisation.
What should a CMO do? Many things apparently, according to Kotler:
Fan-tastic Life Cycle
Got this cool graphic of how fans are created and spawned while surfing Church of the Customer recently. Created by Geno of Brain on Fire from a mashup of Church of the Customer’s loyalty ladder and David Armano’s diagram, it shows in a nifty way how one can reach out to various communities and parties through the Word of Mouth effect.
Now this is what I call a virtuous cycle!
How an Underdog Trumps Disney [Case Study]
Can Whiskers (Wai Wai) take the mickey out of Mickey Mouse? (source of image)
What do you do when an 800 pound gorilla arrives at your door step?
Well, you differentiate, innovate and fight back with all you’ve got. Especially if you are an incumbent home-grown player in your local market.
Biggest Biscuit Bash
Tired of the usual roadshows with pretentious promoters and inane entertainment? Here’s something novel for a change.
In an ingenious use of their product employing one of PR’s oldest trick, biscuit manufacturer Jacob’s recently hit the headlines with their attempt to build Singapore’s biggest biscuit sculpture. Their fabulous feat of food art sits on a platform measuring about 6 by 1.2 metres, with more than 24,000 biscuits from 13 varieties employed. Called Jacob’s Biscuit World, this event showed that biscuits can do a lot more than just stuff your stomach.
I caught some of the action yesterday at Bishan Junction 8 while meeting the Friends of Yesterday (pun unintended).
Fantastic Fireworks
Brought my family to catch the Fireworks Festival, a must go for anybody with a 3.75 year old. Part of the National Day celebration, this year’s event was unique as you could buy tickets to sit comfortably on the floating platform at Marina Bay. At $8 apiece, it wasn’t too expensive. Besides, it gives you a breathtaking view of the action.
Here are some pics and videos for memories. My son Ethan certainly enjoyed it and I am sure he will have sweet dreams tonight.
Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy
Once in a while, you stumble upon a gem of a book which you cannot put down. That happened to me recently, when I read Lovemarks (authored by Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts who blogs here). Apparently, Kevin was in town recently as part of the Global Brand Forum but unfortunately, work commitments made it difficult for me to catch him live in action. Maybe next time.
There are several key ideas in Lovemarks which I found very useful (and which I blogged about before). One of these was that brands (which can be products, places, events or people) that resonated emotionally with people have these three key elements: