Consumer Packaged Goods

09 Jun Consumer Packaged Goods Best Marketing on YouTube

Google's Consumer Packaged Goods Year In Review. "Think CPG" is Googles think tank regarding the consumer packaged goods industry. Think CPG offers unbelievable data for an industry that is still lagging compared to other major industries in the adaptation of technology. As we marketers in the CPG sector approach...

20 Dec Success In Marketing- Content Trumps Bells & Whistles

Successful Consumer Packed Goods Marketers Must Remember: Content Beats Flashy Shiny Stuff

A great story from Doug Garnett's Blog Here’s an important tech axiom: Software Developers have far more interest in applying application bells and whistles than people have in using them.

I learned this success lesson on my first project out of college.

In that project I designed a network of Apple 2′s to display wire wrap harness instructions for avionics assembly at General Dynamics. (To be clear…while today I’m in advertising, back then I was a software engineer with a degree in mathematics. Gotta love how life deals our hands.)

Successful People all around me were saying that;

 “Apple offers color so this project needs to use it”. And, when I noted Apple’s spec that we lost half our resolution instantly, they responded with soft-logic theories that the increased information from color would make up for that loss. But the spec wasn’t entirely honest. Once I decoded the Apple II display it turned out the spec was only accurate if we restricted ourselves to 3 colors (2 + black). But if we used 8, we would drop our horizontal resolution by 8 and vertical resolution by 4 to 16 times. (This rookie analysis apparently impressed my boss and we worked in green & black.) More importantly, it was the right choice for the human equation we were working with. Wire harnesses for a cruise missile were assembled by people and required accurate connections for large bundles of wires. It goes without saying that making an interface that didn’t respect the workers just to apply the sexiness of color would have hurt product & reliability for…um… well…missiles tipped with powerful explosives (sometimes even nuclear).

15 Dec Should Consumer Packaged Goods Track Social Media ROI

If you are not being asked to measure and track the effectiveness of social media investment, you should be doing it on your own. Every dollar matters, and ROI as a measurement is vital for directing future activities and decisions....