Marketing Spoonful

When a new product or service hits supermarkets, it doesn’t take long for everyone else to follow suit. That’s the thing about what Clayton Christensen calls “sustaining innovations.” They are easily imitable and difficult to break out of.
It’s the reason so many hard drive manufacturers went out of business. They were sustaining an innovation trend [...]

Tags: blog, Creativity, disruptive innovation, Food, Innovation, Marketing, Supermarket, sustaining innovation

Remember the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry inadvertently agreed to wear a big, puffy, pirate-looking shirt on national television? Kramer consoled him by telling him that he’d be “the first pirate.” To which Jerry replied, “But I don’t wanna be the pirate!”
When it comes to trying new marketing ideas, some of us recoil in much [...]

Tags: Advertising, Branding, Creativity, new marketing

We just started reading Tom Asacker’s latest book, A Little Less Conversation, and boy, is it good.
Plus, it’s inexpensive, it’s thin and it’s by a proven author, so it’s worth the investment of time and money.
One of the great things Tom and other thinkers like him do is challenge us to think differently about the [...]

Tags: a little less conversation, blog, brainstorm, Branding, creative thinking, Creativity, Marketing, Tom Asacker

It’s time to reintroduce you to the Web’s only place for catalytic thinking for food marketers: Marketing Spoonful.
We hope you’ll take the time to visit today and peruse a couple of our posts. We’ve covered such topics as:

Election-themed innovation brainstorming
How Subway teaches us that duality in marketing is a powerful thing
Why prospecting is a lot [...]

Tags: blog, Business, catalytic thinking, creative thinking, Creativity, Food, ideation, Innovation, Marketing, Product Development, Strategy

We talk so much about the consumer in this space that it’s easy to forget how important the B2B aspect of our business is to our success.
After all, if our channel partners are not fully informed and singularly focused on the end customer’s satisfaction then we cannot succeed.
But how do we keep them interested?
Consider the [...]

Tags: B2B, blog, business analogies, business to business, creative thinking, Creativity, flyfishing analogy, Food, Marketing, prospecting, Sales, Strategy

OK, so the food industry is an indirect beneficiary (if you think subsidies are helpful) of government price supports. But don’t expect help from the government if your brand takes a big WaMu in the near future.
That’s because free enterprise is fine right up until the point big financial business fails. But when was the [...]

Tags: anticipation, blog, brainstorm, competition, Creativity, flanking move, Food, Marketing, opportunity, problem solving, vigilance

If you went to college, chances are you played drinking games. You know, like, take a drink of beer every time Archie Bunker curses on All in the Family. Or take a drink every time the in-studio audiences goes, “Whoo!” at Mona on Who’s the Boss? Or how about people on the couch drink every [...]

Tags: Barack Obama, brainstorming, campaign ad, Creativity, drinking game, election, election game, food marketing, ideation, John McCain, Sarah Palin, thought stimulus

Distraction is sometimes the mother of invention, but it’s usually just the mother of time wasted. That is to say, sometimes we need to intentionally divert our attention from our routine in order to spark the flow of creative energy to our brains.
But most of the time, distraction comes in the form of the urgent [...]

Tags: brainstorming, Creativity, food marketing, ideation, marketing philosophy, problem solving, thinking

You may not have thought about it lately, but it might help to think about where (and when) you do your best thinking.
It is important for us to set time aside each day for thinking. That’s not always going to happen, but when it does, we should use our time as effectively as possible.
It may [...]

Tags: creative thinking, Creativity, fun, stimulation