Sat Duggal's blog

John Gerzema, co-author of The Brand Bubble, a new book that advocates change as the best strategy for brand management in today's market, spoke last fall at the TED conference.

John says there's opportunity in the recent financial crisis as four major cultural shifts drive consumer behavior in new ways.Read more

Throughout 2009, EMM Group released free marketing resources around several organic growth themes, including Segmentation, “Spend Less, Get More,” and “Winning Share”. Take a look at our Best of 2009 post.

In the coming weeks, we will release exciting resources around Bust the Silos, a new book from our own Hunter Hastings and Jeff Saperstein. Bust the Silos shows how to prepare your organization for sustainable and profitable organic growth.Read more

We wanted to call your attention to a poll being run by Adweek on the best marketing of the decade. They have many categories, but the one that caught our attention is the best marketer of the decade . I think the #1 slot is a foregone conclusion with Steve Jobs getting the well-deserved spot at the top of the list. The rest of the line-up for the top 5 places is still hotly contested.

Most companies have some sales or marketing capability improvement project running every year. Many of these projects however fail to achieve their desired objectives. Processes are created but not used. Dashboards are published but not leveraged. Training is imparted but does not substantially change organizational behavior. Our experience and analysis of such projects reveals that there are primarily two reasons for these projects falling short of their desired goals.Read more

Gaining market share is often top-of-mind for many executives. It is a simple metric to understand and visualize, it is usually tracked on an industry-basis and it usually communicates a sense of achievement when the share numbers are looking good. However exclusive focus on market share can also mask numbers that really count – profitability or long-term brand health. In today’s economic environment, many companies are lured into cutting prices to gain market share.Read more

Demand is hard to stimulate while marketing budgets stay depressed. How do you deliver demand generation performance while making every buck count? We have just launched a new growth idea on our website to help spark a discussion on this very timely subject. View our new growth idea.

This picture is of Martin Cooper making the first cell phone call ever on April 3rd, 1973. This “brick-like” phone weighed 30 ounces. When it was commercialized 10 years later, it still weighed 16 ounces and cost $3,500. For those of you who remember early cell phones they all looked about the same, weighed a fair bit and felt as if they were priced by the ounce.Read more

Here are five principles for developing great advertising. While they are not meant to be a comprehensive list of everything you need to do to produce great advertising, doing these elements correctly can help you to a large extent in producing tremendously successful advertising.Read more

1. Based on powerful idea relevant to target audience.
   Relevance must be based on deep consumer insight, offering distinctive permission to purchase in preference to competition.
   

I recently read the Six Rules of Brand Revitalization which discusses the turn-around at McDonald’s and the role that marketing and brand management played in that revitalization. The book is written by Larry Light who was CMO at McDonald’s during the turn-around and Joan Kiddon who was consulting with McDonald’s.Read more

I'm pleased to announce that Ralph Cummins, a leader and master of organic growth approaches, has joined EMM Group. Ralph brings an uncommon breadth and depth of experience on both the agency and client side to EMM Group. He was recently the head of global brand development at Genworth and before that held various leading positions at agencies such as Leo Burnett, McCann and BBDO.Read more