SlideShare: The Quiet Giant Of Content Marketing

Marketers and advertisers the world over are constantly trying to find the “next big thing.” The one thing that will allow them to stand out from the crowd. Back in the day of course it was TV, radio and direct mail or email for example. Then came the digital revolution and mobile marketing and social media marketing took center stage – and rightly so.

Today, it’s content marketing.

While all the aforementioned mediums remain and always will be key players in any integrated marketing communications campaign, clearly content marketing is the next big thing – at least for right now.

And a major tool in the content marketing arsenal may be one that many of you have heard of and visited, but perhaps have not used to date – SlideShare.

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What Will Become Of The Lance Armstrong Brand?

The sordid tale of Lance Armstrong is unfolding right before our eyes across the web, social media and of course TV in addition to pretty much every other channel known to man.

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Back in August of this year I wrote an article about Penn State and if their brand had received the death penalty. While obviously different on many fronts, there are some similarities between Penn State and Lance Armstrong when it comes to branding and there’s a lesson for all marketers and advertisers.

The opening two paragraphs of the aforementioned Penn State article fit like a glove when overlaid onto the Lance Armstrong saga:

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Do Brands Have A Responsibility When It Comes To Packaging?

Last year I wrote a story about The Most Misleading Packaging Design I Have Ever Seen. The inspiration for my article came from a text message my wife had sent me while at our kids’ school.

The text message include a picture and, as I wrote originally “What I thought was one thing turned out to be something completely different entirely and made me want to openly question the motives behind brand packaging design.”

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When Taglines Go Bad – The Best Buy Saga

So there I was minding my own business when I came across an article on Fast Company entitled What Every CEO Can Learn From Best Buy’s (Continued) Branding Mistakes. Written by David Brier, who I know to be not only a great writer but also a branding expert, the article made reference to the new tagline the much-maligned Best Buy recently trotted out after what was surely an exhaustive 18-month odyssey. Truth be told the 18 months was spent “working to reframe the retailer’s brand proposition” and the new tagline was one item that came out of said reframing.

The new tagline for Best Buy is, wait for it “Making technology work for you.”

In his article Brier refers to the tagline as “not only tired, it is a death sentence that is bland, old, worn, uninspired and not reflective of a single strand of your customer’s aspirations.” He also, quite correctly I might add, says the tagline “reeks of “marketing speak” and “committee-itis.”

He goes on to talk about branding in general but I want to focus squarely on this horrifically bad tagline.

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