Welcome to the KPC blog! Here you’ll find fresh commentary on all things marketing and research, from historical anecdotes on marketing and research to the latest in advertising today. If it strikes our fancy, we’ll be blogging.

Drama!

It's like Goodfellas in the magazine world these days.

I wonder if the mag people get their own kitchen in jail...where they can slice the garlic with a razor blade until it's really, really thin.

Covers

The American Society of Magazine Editors has recently named the John and Yoko Rolling Stone cover as the "best" of all time. This seems pretty fair to me. I'm sure there are good arguments to be made for any of the 41 covers that landed on the "top" list, but that cover is both arresting and socially significant at the same time. And has the ability to feel both timeless and entirely of the moment.

In the article, a professor of magazine journalism from Syracuse says, "The [covers] that work best touch us in the same way that great art touches us ... stirring our very deepest human emotions."

This, and the fact that simple descriptions of a number of other covers instantly brought the cover image into sharp focus in my mind, makes me think that brand managers and marketers should be studying the list like Warren Buffett studies the stock market: with intense scrutiny.

There's a lot to learn from iconic and powerful images. They're in the business of communication, but a very slightly different type of communication than ads. Understanding and applying the creative process leading up to these images to brands could make an enormous impact.

Luxury Brand Management and Higher Education

Having spent some time working with anthropologists in the corporate setting, I've also been exposed to a number of anthropologists (and other social scientists) who work in something closer to their natural habitat: for non-profits or in academia.

When I'm talking about marketing or idea generation with people who work outside of marketing, I'm always struck by how well the simplest marketing brainstorming techniques are received. Ideas that are second nature to marketers are positively fawned over by those who don't spent their days immersed in consumer segmentation and their nights dreaming about "buzz."

But soon, I think, I won't be able to so easily impress anyone. And that will be thanks, in part, to Malcolm Gladwell. A social scientist and a marketer, Gladwell is quickly becoming famous outside of the cubicled walls of corporate America.

In this week's New Yorker, Gladwell writes an essay on "the social logic of Ivy League admissions." His observations are interesting, if not shocking, leaving me thinking I'd always known that his findings were true, but I'd never been conscious of them.

As a marketer, the most interesting piece of the article was at the end, when Gladwell very convincingly makes the case that the admissions staffs of the Ivies are not just academic nitpickers or angels granting wishes to future students. They are brand-shapers.

And he's right. The Harvard brand is largely decided, and maintained, by its students and alumni. So those who develop and implement the admissions criteria for Harvard are, in effect, developing and maintaining the brand.

Interesting reading not only for people in the business of brands, or of higher education, but for anyone who's in the business of selling or managing anything.