What Your Customers Can Teach You About Your Own Company
As Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy this past September, Fast Company ran an excellent summary of Blockbuster’s woes by author Adrian Ott. Her take? Blockbuster misunderstood why people were choosing Netflix and Redbox in the first place, and they could never recover from their own clouded…
How The Children’s Aid Society Is Getting a Crowdfunding Boost Thanks to Ed Norton
You may know actor Ed Norton from films like Rounders, Red Dragon and American History X. What you may not know is that Ed Norton is also one of many celebrities who’ve embraced the power of social media to create real, tangible change among real…
Mining the News for Social Marketing Opportunities
Thanks to the speed of the Internet, a meme can become a global phenomenon in a matter of hours. So it’s no wonder that some advertisers find creative ways to exploit the latest news headlines as a way to inject themselves into the larger conversation…
Never Miss an Opportunity to Humanize Your Brand
Our client, Bigelow Tea, recently announced a new business partnership with Bruegger’s, the Vermont-based chain of bagel bakeries who’ve agreed to carry Bigelow’s line of organic teas. To help celebrate this nifty news, Bigelow asked Creative Concepts (that’s us) to film a video featuring Cindi…
Are You Sacrificing Your Brand to the Social Media Gods?
You know the story: Gap changes their logo, the public hates it, and then Gap says they’ll crowdsource an alternative. But, in the end, Gap just decides to stick with their original logo after all, claiming that they “learned a lot” from the public’s feedback….
Creative Concepts and Bigelow Tea Are Thrilled to Have Been “Discovered”
It’s Columbus Day here in the US, and that means some people are taking a moment to reflect on our country’s history. Whether or not Columbus truly “discovered” America is debatable, but one thing’s for sure: he must have been thrilled when he found it…
Does Your Brand Change the Way People Feel About Themselves?
The science of branding is fascinating, because it tells us more about ourselves than we’re normally willing to admit. For example, a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research (reported here by Fast Company Design) indicates that merely being associated with a brand can…
Social Media Is Changing the Nature of Grassroots Giving
This excellent summary of 24 different fundraising tools to help non-profits (and artists alike) raise support for their initiatives highlights a different use for social media than we usually discuss: giving. Charities, community organizations and other non-profits usually rely on the generosity of their supporters…
3 Ways Your Brand Can Use Twitter for Customer Service
As we mentioned last week, social media is becoming increasingly important in building customer loyalty. If your customers enjoy interacting with your brand on Twitter, Facebook, etc., they’re more likely to see and act on your messages, from sales to reviews to requests for help….
Customer Loyalty Drives Social Media Budgets
According to research in US markets, companies who say they use social media primarily to strengthen customer loyalty spend almost twice as much on social media as companies who use these same tools primarily to increase brand awareness. These findings reinforce the “conversational” nature of…