The Hub Profiles: Twelve of the boldest and brightest in marketing share their stories. Six years and 37 issues ago, when we launched the Hub, our vision was for a different kind of magazine. We looked around and saw an industry of ideas and a culture of thought leadership that needed a home. We saw an opportunity to create conversations where they otherwise might not happen.

We also knew that we would need the spirited voices of the boldest and brightest in the business to realize our vision. If the Hub were to live up to its promise to explore innovation as the ultimate driver of success in business, we needed to collaborate with some really outstanding movers and thinkers.

The Hub would be their opportunity to create and sustain a thought-leadership message over time, and build their reputations through white papers, research reports, roundtables and essays. They could create conversations and make connections with the top marketers at America’s largest companies ... read>>

Marketing chief Jaime Cohen Szulc unlocks true meaning for Levi’s. An exclusive Q&A interview by Tim Manners.

As far as Jaime Cohen Szulc is concerned, emerging media could be almost anything. It could be the Facebook “like”  buttons that Levi’s has added to every item in its online store.

It could be Gareth Hornberger, the @levisguy on Twitter. It could be Levi’s iPhone app or information about Fader/Fort, an indie-music festival.

But it could also be a Levi’s pop-up print workshop in San Francisco, stamping out decidedly non-digital posters, books and T-shirts (see sidebar). It could even be the economically depressed town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, which Levi’s is featuring in an old-media television advertising campaign ... read >>

A discussion featuring Bob Anderson of Ahold USA, Dan Cooke of Kellogg Company, Kevin Kells of Google and Jason Katz of Catapult Marketing.

What is the greatest untapped opportunity with emerging media?

Kevin Kells: In the past, most industries tended to focus on emerging media as a transactional or direct response driver. But people increasingly are realizing the brand-building promise of emerging-media platforms. That’s a big switch from a headset standpoint. Brand-building and transactional are not mutually exclusive; they are highly linked ... read >>

A multichannel eco-system serves shopper needs. By Masha Sajdeh. In the era of multichannel marketing, the roles and relevance of both traditional and new channels is being questioned.

As the battle for channel supremacy rages, we are left wondering: What role does the store play in a world where people have many other shopping and buying options?

Why should a shopper have to go to a retailer and a manufacturer website? Can a last-minute price check on a mobile phone really match the diligence of comparison-shopping online? ... read >>

Mobile phones are the new brand compass. By Beth Ann Kaminkow. Mobile is quickly becoming one of the best navigation tools for linking shoppers with brands. It is our wireless compass along the path-to-purchase.

For retailers, manufacturers and agencies, the explosion of mobile capability and adoption exponentially expand opportunities for informing, engaging and persuading shoppers.

But marketers need to move just as fast — and just as creatively — as the technologies and the users. The more quickly and nimbly we experiment with this multimedia navigator, the faster we will drive shopper behaviors and reap those benefits ... read >>

The digital age offers a new path-to-purchase model. By Stanley Stevens. It may be surprising to hear that Puma, the athletic apparel brand, released a smartphone earlier this year.

It may be even more surprising to hear that, despite the lack of mobile technology experience at Puma, this was actually an intelligent, marketing-driven decision.

Why would Puma create a technology that seems so far from its core business or product? The answer lies within an idea called beyond the product marketing, which aims to fully leverage today’s technologies ... read >>

Caribou turns a cup of coffee into a daily affirmation. By Dori Molitor. Why bother? That’s what I call the drink I always order at Caribou because it has everything taken out of it.

I’m not really a coffee drinker so I always get a skim-milk, decaf latte with sugar-free hazelnut flavoring to mask the coffee taste.

The bigger, and even more obvious question is, why do I bother going to Caribou at all if I don’t even particularly like coffee? Why would anyone go there to spend five dollars on any drink, with the economy still struggling and with a Starbucks right across the street? ... read >>

Marketing needs to change before the cost structure of media-spend collapses. By Uri Baruchin. They say time flies when you’re having fun. Perhaps it flies even faster when you’re confused.

Even though the first commercial website, O’Reilly Media’s GNN, launched nearly two decades ago, in August 1993, the marketing community’s attitude toward the internet is still split between two mutually exclusive attitudes, which eye each other suspiciously.

On one side we have the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed evangelical digital radicals, declaring digital to be the end of marketing as we know it, if not the end of marketing, period ... read >>

Retail promotions may have a stronger impact on brand sales and identity than advertising. By Will Minton. Shopper-marketing stakeholders talk a lot about the need to “quantify the path-to-purchase” — not just to measure the effectiveness of programs and tactics, but also to evaluate them against traditional advertising investments.

Sales response models might make a nice playing field on which to compare retail marketing to traditional advertising. While shopper-marketing advocates frequently measure program effectiveness through direct sales effects, the traditional advertising world has shunned these models ... read >>

Jesse Spungin explains how ConAgra nailed shopper marketing. By Chris Hoyt and Tim Manners. In both 2009 and 2010, ConAgra Foods was voted by its peers as one of the top three companies in the Hub’s annual “Top 12” report on shopper-marketing excellence.

What has ConAgra done to earn this? What are the essential building blocks that define ConAgra’s shopper-marketing approach? What can others learn from ConAgra’s experience? To find out, the Hub spoke with Jesse Spungin, ConAgra’s former vice-president of shopper marketing ... read >>

The unexpected is influential when using emerging media to engage shoppers. By Sara Quist. We cannot deny it: The tried-and- true marketing vehicles such as FSIs, television and print advertising,  circulars and in-store signage will continue to be a mainstay in a brand’s marketing mix.

That’s why we call them tried-and-true; they are expected by shoppers. But to succeed in today’s media-savvy world, traditional vehicles must be complemented with newer vehicles that demonstrate a refreshed sense of communication — one that starts a deeper conversation ... read >>

New complexities require new math for new media. By Mary Pocsik. The recession and still-sluggish economy may have decreased total ad dollars, but economic uncertainty doesn’t seem to slow the increasing number of new media-tactics or investments in them.

Which of these emerging media are most effective? In the past, that question could be answered with relative ease: Media choices were limited to print, radio and television. Today, the so-called traditional media triumvirate is quickly being displaced (or at least augmented) by a plethora of digitally-driven options ... read >>

Less can be more when it comes to creating meaningful brand distinctions. By Spencer L. Hapoienu. Youngme Moon has written a remarkable book called Different: Escaping The Competitive Herd.

Moon, a marketing professor at Harvard, deconstructs the business of marketing and exposes something that is not a surprise — marketing has become predictable, interchangeable and un-creative.

Of course, that’s a broad generalization, but one that she aptly demonstrates to be true. At the same time, it provides Moon with a platform to showcase what she calls “reverse brands” ... read >>

Are we addicted to digital devices? Maybe a little? An executive summary of a Reveries.com survey. Forty-four percent — a plurality of our readers — admitted that they are “maybe a little” addicted to digital devices. Is it even possible to be “maybe a little” addicted? Or are you either addicted or not?

This could be a matter for further analysis or discussion, but if those who answered “yes” are included, a clear majority of 77 percent has some sort of difficulty with stepping back from their computers. Just 20 percent said they were not addicted ... read >>

On Sale Now! Teaching old media new tricks. Please tell everyone you know: The Hub is now on sale at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores in the United States and Canada! Yes, it’s about time that a magazine about innovation and retail as the driver of business success would be available in stores.

But it’s also understandable that some might call that a hollow accomplishment. After all, print media are dying. So are the brick-and-mortar retail stores in which they are sold. Get with the smartphone program: Get on Kindle, iPad and iPhone ... read >>

BankSimple, The Eye Hub and Citizen Commerce. Josh Reich is creating a banking experience that’s “more akin to Twitter than to Chase.” Josh is a 32-year-old “former equity researcher at a New York investment fund” who thinks traditional banks “suck.”

His solution is called BankSimple and has no bank branches — in fact, it isn’t even chartered as a bank (money is “held at FDIC-insured partners, mainly nonretail institutions that manage money held on gift cards and flexible spending accounts”). Members get a debit card that “is also linked to a small credit line ... read >>

Hamlet’s BlackBerry, Cognitive Surplus and Extra Lives. Hamlet’s BlackBerry, by William Powers, takes its title from a Shakespearean reference to technology, reports David Harsanyi in the Wall Street Journal (6/30/10). Here’s the money quote: “Yea, from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records.”

It “refers to an Elizabethan technical advance: specially coated paper or parchment that could be wiped clean. A book that included heavy, blank, erasable pages made from such paper ... was called a ‘table.'" William’s book is about the many ways in which our addiction to devices like the BlackBerry have cluttered our minds, and our lives. He’s no Luddite, though. He admits to being as addicted to digital connectivity as the rest of us ... read >>

The Hub Magazine, Vol. 6, Issue 38. The entire issue of Sep/Oct 2010 edition of The Hub Magazine, centered on emerging media, featuring a cover story interview with Jaime Cohen Szulc, chief marketing officer of Levi's.

Also featuring a roundtable featuring Bob Anderson of Ahold, Dan Cooke of Kellogg's and Kevin Kells of Google, along with thirteen white papers, surveys and essays and book reviews. download pdf >>