For some reason I have been obsessed lately with Circuit City and Best Buy – a tale of two companies. Maybe because of all the holiday and Super Bowl promotions around Flat Screen TV’s. Regardless of why, it makes me think back to my days as a retail executive with the now defunct May Department Store Company, which merged with Federated Department Stores last year.
May Company grew dramatically during the 80’s and early 90’s under the leadership of David Farrell. It grew through the acquisition of a number of other traditional department stores – mainly regional players. Then May centralized a number of functions creating efficiencies and more central control. For a number of years it held the title of the nation’s largest department store company (if you classify out discounters such as Sears, Wal-Mart, Target, and JC Penney’s).

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Every Woz needs a Jobs. And every Jobs needs a Woz. I’m talking, of course, about Apple Computer co-founders, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs.

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Brand Noise has a post about a “hot new idea shop” called Fahrenheit 212. The post links to a BusinessWeek article about the firm. From that article:

Clients think of the firm as a way to make long-shot bets without having to use their own research and development resources. “Samsung is a lean organization. We can’t afford to have people coming up with ideas that don’t work,” says Chief Marketing Officer Gregory Lee. “The people at Fahrenheit are very helpful because they are working on ideas that can fail–it allows you to experiment a bit.” What’s more, Fahrenheit ties much of its compensation to the success of the product, making it an even safer bet.

I think the focus on innovation that the marketplace has been entertaining for the last several years presages more and more of these kind of enterprises. Back when we were starting bigwidesky, my partner Mike told me of a survey of the clients of ad agencies he’d read in which the single biggest gripe was that the agencies weren’t bringing any powerful ideas. I, for one, am happy to sidle up and fill that hole with the most amazing ideas we can concoct. Clearly we’re not the only ones with this ambition.

An inevitable debate is taking place around the nature of the marketing. John Moore, at his excellent blog, Brand Autopsy, has been a recent party to the discussion. He offers this edited footage of David Jones, global CEO of Euro RSCG speaking at a recent AdAge clambake.

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Russell Davies recently posted the results of his “what will marketing become” poll. This reminded me that it’s been awhile since I posted the introduction to my little exegesis on the future of marketing, so I figured I’d best finish off this second piece. The top two winners of his poll were especially inspiring in this pursuit. Here goes:
I’ve long had the sense that marketers—especially the “stars” of the field—constitute something like a “prelacy of cool.” I think I extracted this idea from some Emigre essay I read like eight years ago. The essay in question isn’t available on their site, and I can’t recall the issue of the magazine in which it appeared, but it was of a piece with other of their essays in one respect; it decried the ostensible “co-opting of cool” which commercial interests visit upon the otherwise vital, dynamic art of the social vanguard. In a move that surely evoked both the adoration and egoic ire of the Emigre coterie, this essayist denominated the marketers whom execute this diabolism as, “Antinomian (Wikipedia, Catholic Encyclopedia).” I admit, I thought it was pretty clever. Which is why I’m stealing it.

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