“... as retailers try to make up with sale items all the sales they were unable to realize with regular pricing, they’re daring consumers to revalue what they’re buying. The greater the pricing variability, the less qualities of brand have any inherent value. Something that costs less due to the exigencies of sellers can never fully be worth more when it comes to the needs of buyers.

Sales are a chronic affliction for businesses, and a constant reminder to consumers that all the imagined promises of branding don’t necessarily connect to the reality of prices.  This week’s sales aren’t price discounts; they’re proof that efforts to sell stuff the remainder of the year will be attempted at inflated prices.”

Jonathan Salem Baskin
Author
Branding Only Works on Cattle

“... our industry (catalogers and direct marketers) hawks the standard ‘Multichannel Customers Are The Best Customers’ line. We encourage people to read the paper and consume information online. We homogenize the overall user experience by trying to make the look and feel of each medium appear the same—instead of capitalizing on the unique differences between channels, we try to force people into doing things the way we want for them to do things, causing both channels to fail.”

Kevin Hillstrom
President
MineThatData

“... when we reach the point where we’re writing massive amounts of content that’s designed only for computers to read, we’ve reached a tipping point where marketing becomes a parody of itself. In the name of cutting through the clutter, we create more clutter. In the name of building customer relationships, we develop content that customers would never want to read. Instead of putting our resources and creativity into actually connecting with customers, we focus instead on trying to engineer some immaculately efficient engine to boil the ocean and spit out customers ready to buy our product with the least amount of input or effort…

I’ve discovered that about 70% of the splogs (content posted for no other purpose than to game search traffic) we’re filtering out are posted at Blogspot, a free blog service owned by Google. That’s right. Google. The company whose mission it is to help you cut through the noise and clutter on the Internet also happens to be one the biggest enablers of noise and clutter on the Internet…

We’re on a quest for clinical efficiency, but all the while we keep talking about customer intimacy. And then we wonder why consumers themselves are so drawn to social media, drawn inexplicably to connect with other consumers to share experiences that belie all the marketing bullshit their lives are flooded with every moment.”

Chris Kenton
SocialRep

“We may be at an inflection point in the evolution of search, which finally breaks out of the ‘immediate ROI’ calculus toward a more holistic understanding of what’s really important. The challenge, of course, is a company’s operational ability to track, report, and analyze those numbers that span channels and departments.

The catalyst for true search/media integration and a breakdown of operational silos may actually be business-threatening times like these; breakdown, break-through as they say.”

Gerry Bavaro
EVP, DidIt.com
(via MediaPost)

“Forget about ROI. Social media (when you get there) will be a cost of doing business...”

Joe Pulizzi
Z Squared Media LLC
Author, Get Content Get Customers

“Search doesn’t build brand, search connects people to brands at just the right time…

We don’t spend a lot of time interacting with search messages. This is spot scanning at best, not a thorough assessment. We don’t read listings, we glance at words. When enough hits register to establish relevancy matches with the goal of our search, based on the words we used in the query and those that remain locked up in our prefrontal cortex, we click.”

Gord Hotchkiss
(Via MediaPost)