Creating a cult brand

By Chris Kneeland The world’s most significant businesses—known affectionately as “cult brands” given their irrational levels of fan adoration and customer affinity—typically display five key attributes. These companies: 1. Enjoy above-average brand attachment, which is a specific metric measuring audience engagement, more so than awareness or likelihood to refer. People …

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Defining Customer Personas

By Richard Boire Creating customer personas is one of the core deliverables of marketing analytics. The assumption is often made that with a defined customer persona, “I can then use this information to target customers”. This is misleading and does not provide the real value of customer personas within the …

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Canada Post’s Doug Ettinger on the Future of Mail Marketing

By Brendan Read The June issue of DM Magazine published an article, “Letters to the president”, to Canada Post Corporation president and CEO Doug Ettinger. It was a compilation of open letters written by Patrick Bartlett, executive director, National Association of Major Mail Users (NAMMU), Steve Falk, president, Prime Data …

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Navigating outsourcing

By Corey Kotlarz Think about your last handful of interactions with a customer support representative. You probably think you know which of those conversations featured a company employee working out of a corporate office. You’re probably wrong. In reality, more and more companies are adopting and expanding call centre outsourcing …

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The keys to multicultural audiences

By Jim Green Jatinder Rai gets very concerned when clients think a multicultural community is homogenous. Language, values and beliefs can vary significantly within communities and neighbourhoods, explained the founder and president of Response Advertising Inc. Marketers targeting a multicultural audience need to take the time to learn about the …

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DRTV: The recipe for Success

By Nicole Andani Many North Americans still watch over three hours of television daily. But that amount has been declining1. More importantly, the manner in which consumers watch has dramatically changed. Traditional TV watching has now changed to “personalized content on the go”. Programming is being streamed or PVR’d and …

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Transforming Marketing Strategy: Interview with Niraj Dawar

By Stephen Shaw Niraj Dawar is a professor emeritus, marketing, at Ivey Business School, University of Western Ontario, which is one of the premier business schools in the world. He is the author of the book Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers. Most marketing leaders say that driving …

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What is “Publicly Available Information”?

By Sara Clodman “Publicly Available Information” isn’t necessarily what you think it is. We live in a digital and interconnected economy, where consumers want to benefit from increasingly intuitive products and services to match their evolving expectations. So, when individuals publicly share information about their tastes and preferences on a …

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