Simon Mainwaring

We First provides consulting and training to help companies tell the story of their good work in ways that build their business

Consumers

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By now most of us are aware of various crowdsourcing campaigns being used to generate ideas, funds or support for a brand or cause. Pepsi’s Refresh Project, Mystarbucksidea.com and Dell’s Social Innovation Competition are three well-known examples. We are now witnessing a second generation of crowdsourcing efforts in which social entrepreneurs are reinventing their industries […]

By now most of us are aware of various crowdsourcing campaigns being used to generate ideas, funds or support for a brand or cause. Pepsi’s Refresh Project, Mystarbucksidea.com and Dell’s Social Innovation Competition are three well-known examples. We are now witnessing a second generation of crowdsourcing efforts in which social entrepreneurs are reinventing their industries …

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Pepsi makes brown sugar water that can contribute to obesity. Dove’s ‘Real beauty’ campaign was created by Unilever that also does the Axe campaign. Walmart has raised the bar on sustainability standards. In fact, almost every brand doing meaningful work can be accused of providing some product or service that can be harmful, and many so-called …

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I wanted to share a potentially transformative trend coming out of Japan. Last week Mixi, Japan’s largest social networking site, introduced two APIs – mixi PluginJ and mixi Graph APIsJ –  designed to let the third parties integrate their social web services and apps with Mixi. For example, Panasonic is developing a DVD recorder that allows you …

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Mashable and BBHLabs wrote about the future of ad agencies this week, so I decided to join the fray. As seminars at the Cannes Advertising Festival this year revealed, there is no doubt that the industry recognizes it is under assault from new technology, competitors and tools that threaten their critical relationships with major clients. …

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BP’s handling of the Deepwater Horizon disaster demonstrates a lack of understanding as to how technology has changed the consumer marketplace. Their PR efforts have effectively pitted traditional media (such as TV and newspaper ads) against social media (such as the Boycott BP page on Facebook that has received close to a million ‘Likes’ or the …

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The title for this post paraphrases a quote from a Chinese salesman featured in a story on counterfeit products in the New York Times magazine last weekend. While the salesman was speaking directly to accusations regarding the legality of selling counterfeit sneakers, he touched on a much larger issue for marketers. Since the birth of …

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