Is Obama to McCain as Nokia is to Diet Coke?

"If Obama Is Nokia, Then McCain Is Diet Coke" writes Aaron Baar in MediaPosts' Marketing Daily.
I'm going to stretch the metaphor a bit, but the title just begged a quick comparison. So, does a comparison of consumers who like Obama on social media with those who like McCain look anything like a comparison of Nokia [...]

Troubled Project Playlist is NO. 1 Widget Provider

TechCrunch wrote yesterday on trouble at Project Playlist, a service that lets users create music playlists and embed them on their social network profiles.
What amazes me is that people don't realize that playlist.com the No. 1 widget provider right now.
A look at data from compete.com, comparing playlist.com with two other top widget makers – slide.com [...]

Lamppost-driven Exploration

Today, a joke:
A drunk loses the keys to his house and is looking for them under a lamppost. A policeman comes over and asks what he’s doing.“I’m looking for my keys” he says. “I lost them over there”.The policeman looks puzzled. “Then why are you looking for them all the way over here?”“Because the light [...]

Data First, Theories Later

My favorite gurus are talking about data this week.
In a great post today, Seth Godin discusses his five elements of marketing (and only one of them starts with a "P"). He begins with data and makes the following statement:
"Data is powerful, overlooked and sometimes mistaken for boring. You don’t have to understand the why, you [...]

The Treachery of Images

The other day, I learned the hard way how dangerous it is to rely on people’s prior conceptions to deliver a new concept.

I presented HiveSight as a new kind of tool for market research. Unfortunately, the "new" part was lost on the person in front of me, and instead he chose to focus on the [...]

Try Before You Buy

A guiding principle of HiveSight has been a pet peeve of mine with many websites. A company builds some online application, puts up a site that explains all about it, along with video or flash tours and lots of marketing blah blah, but you can’t touch the actual goods and see for yourself. It’s like [...]

Long Tail Friendly Market Research

The Long Tail phenomenon – the fragmentation of markets into many small niches, creates exciting new opportunities for smart marketers. Your first problem though is coming up with the data you need -  traditional market research methods fail to deliver that data.Surveying merely thousands of people is not enough since niches, by definition, would be [...]

A Market Research Engine

What happens when you set a creative mind free?You can never tell in advance, but you can bet that it’ll be something beautiful.
So how do you set a creative mind free?You make it easy to be creative. You supply inputs that spark new ideas, and tools that make it easy to shape those ideas into [...]