Influx Insights

Influx Insights is produced by Influx Strategic Consulting, a division of BSSP, a communication agency providing advertising, design, interactive and brand consulting services for a diverse range of clients including; MINI USA, Converse, Sun Microsytems and Diageo

"Marketers need to wake up and start dealing with these breakdowns in customer service and product quality. The Internet is now working as a hypersensitive amplifier of the whisperings of consumer dissatisfaction. If marketers fail to deal and manage this, they could end up paying the ultimate price, lost sales, missed targets and no Christmas bonuses to spend on all those nice consumer goods."

December 7th, 2005

"Brand marketers seem to be clinging to the belief that just by saying they have an emotional connection with the consumer, they really do. It's a word that's evolved from the 1950s and 1990s and is now starting to look a little dated and over-used, a little C20th. It's become a marketing Weasel Word and a crutch to avoid explaining the REAL relationship. It seems like you press a button on standard CMO and the word automatically spews out."

December 5th, 2005

"In a battle for authenticity, whose emotions are more relevant, the ones manufactured by corporations or the ones really experienced by consumers? The answer is that you probably need both and you can have both. Great advertising, as long as it is great, is like great filmmaking, it has the power to inspire us and the new openness of the Internet now allows people to tell their own stories. So the future is probably about a combination of these two elements, inspiration and participation.

One of the upcoming battles in the marketing world will be over creative control. How much are advertisers and their agencies willing to encourage creative contributions from consumers and exactly how will they facilitate a process that enables people to tell their stories in a compelling way?"

November 8th, 2005