Why do some brands make it into your basket while others stay on the shelf?  What makes us want to buy one and not the other?  Is it solely their inherent quality or is there something else at stake? A branding expert would say that this is no accident: it’s the emotional tug of a successful brand at work. We thought it would be interesting and useful to compare two brands Continue reading →

I used our Skyttle API term extractor to analyse the language of an article about a pop star. But who is being described? cultural shift (1) bully boys (1) works bus (1) property shows (1) class-coded oscillation (1) countless young men (1) record player (1) black-and-white films (1) sure many people (1) bouquet of gladioli (1) local leisure centre (1) second-hand copies (1) humdrum town life (1) studio audience (1) Continue reading →

A 17-year-old blogger Rhys Morgan has questioned the benefits of a purported cancer treatment – antineoplaston therapy – offered by a Texan clinic run by a Stanislaw Burzynski. He has been threatened by someone claiming to be a lawyer for this clinic – Marc Stephens. The treatment has been in the news because comedian Peter Kay has performed two concerts to raise money for the treatment. Burzynski has previously been Continue reading →

We got a pingback yesterday on an old blog post about the reintroduction to the market of the Cadbury chocolate bar Wispa. Our claim was that the success of Wispa in sales terms validated using social media in business decision-making. The blogger – working for a measurement agency – suggested it was not possible to attribute the extraordinary sales of the bar to word of mouth/social media. We disagree. The Continue reading →

Facebook’s f8 announcements could have been designed exactly to address the worries we recently aired about how the social network works for brands. Facebook is striving to be effective for brands in the way in the way Google is, by being useful without being intrusive. Jon Prideaux of Finextra hits the nail on the head. Google has solves the problem of intention for advertisers in a very practical way. When Continue reading →