A Quote by Fred Wilson

Marketing is for companies who have sucky products. — © Fred Wilson
Marketing is for companies who have sucky products.
One thing the humanitarian world doesn't do well is marketing. As a journalist, I get pitched every day by companies that have new products. Meanwhile, you have issues like clean water, literacy for girls, female empowerment. People flinch at the idea of marketing these because marketing sounds like something only companies do.
Over the past 60 years, marketing has moved from being product-centric (Marketing 1.0) to being consumer-centric (Marketing 2.0). Today we see marketing as transforming once again in response to the new dynamics in the environment. We see companies expanding their focus from products to consumers to humankind issues. Marketing 3.0 is the stage when companies shift from consumer-centricity to human-centricity and where profitability is balanced with corporate responsibility.
I have shifted my mindset in terms of how companies should... focus on building amazing products. If you have amazing products, the marketing of those products is trivial.
A lot of very popular mainstream artists are products of record companies and marketing companies, and any time anyone can stand outside of that, that's interesting.
More and more, companies are realizing the value of their female consumers, and that's showing up in the female-specific products they're making, their marketing strategies, and even the feel of their companies internally.
Over the years of running Into The Gloss, I began to see a gap in the way beauty companies were creating products and marketing them to women. There wasn't one brand that really spoke to girls like me, who created products for real life. So we set out to create that brand with Glossier.
Just in the past couple of years, there's been pushback against some of that marketing, as parents have gotten really upset. Now we're seeing Coke and Pepsi kind of shape-shifting. Instead of doing these very explicit marketing deals, they are getting into schools in much more hidden ways - things like My Coke Rewards, where they encourage schools to push their student body to purchase Coke products, in exchange for points that go toward various products for the school. It's a way for these companies to get in front of kids, presented as a form of charity.
I see "demand creation" as a 20th-century construct that's bound up with advertising. It's an outmoded view of marketing that says, "First, we build a product or service, then we advertise it into people's lives." Embedded this view is the belief that companies control brands. This is a myth. My message all along has been that brands are actually created by customers, not companies. Companies only provide the raw materials - the products, messaging, behaviors - that people use these to create brands.
It used to be that American and European companies built their products in low-wage countries, separated by great distances from the innovators who developed the products and the markets where they were sold. But companies increasingly find that is an outmoded way of doing business.
If Canadian companies want to sell products to the E.U., they have to prove those products conform with E.U. product safety, health and environmental rules. This involves extra bureaucracy, controls and paperwork. If the U.K. had a Canada-style deal with the E.U., U.K. companies would have to do the same.
Since Snowden went public, companies such as Apple and Google - two of the world's most valuable companies - have incorporated much greater encryption into their products and have also been at pains to show that they will not go along with U.S. government demands to access their encrypted products.
Arthur Hughes is one of the pioneers of modern database marketing. His new book, Strategic Database Marketing, Third Edition, contains the wisdom of twenty years of database marketing experience from scores of companies throughout the US. I can heartily endorse Arthur's book for anyone who wants to know the state of the art in database marketing today.
The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.
Many companies forget what it means to make great products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over and the product people eventually make their way out.
The one thing you don't want to be is a sucky clean comic. I hate sucky clean comics! It's like Christian rock, bro. I'd rather listen to gospel and Christian rock. That's cheating!
Companies like Nike already use Graffiti as a standard variety in their marketing campaigns and the first people who read Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' were marketing gurus who wanted to know what they shouldn't do.
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