Z-Files

Outstanding article in the latest Harvard Business Review from Douglas Holt, author of the book How Brands Become Icons. Holt wrote his book about a decade ago and since that…

An article from The Atlantic,“The Incredible Thing We Do During Conversations,” sheds light on both the workings of the unconscious mind and the commonalities in how all humans communicate.There is…

We in the US will be awash in polling numbers for the next nine months in the run-up to the presidential election.  An article in the New Yorker casts some…

Interesting example of behavioral economics at work – or not - and why it is so hard to break habits. A University of Missouri professor, Laura McCann, studied the use…

With the Super Bowl coming up on Sunday, Google has some useful advice for marketers who want to emerge as winners on the big day.1) Increasingly, the Super Bowl is…

Another example of a brand leveraging virtual reality: The North Face. As this article describes, The North Face has taken its consumers to Yosemite, Moab Desert, and Nepal via 360-degree…

At Olson Zaltman, we frequently see the Deep Metaphor of Connection as one that structures people's thinking. This example goes back a few months, but it is still a good…

Happy New Year! A bit of housekeeping from the end of last year was the release of the Mobile Marketing Association’s 2015 Global Smarties Trends Report. It illustrates six trends…

Frankly, the relevance of this article for marketing is pretty nebulous. We just thought it was cool. New research from linguists at Cal-Berkeley and the French National Center for Scientific…

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife last week penned an open letter to their newborn daughter in which they pledged to donate 99% of their Facebook shares to charity throughout their…

Thanks to Joe Plummer for sharing this very incisive blog post about how metaphors spark innovation and sell ideas.  There probably are no brand new ideas for any of you…

Matthew Feinberg (U. of Toronto) and Robb Willer (Stanford) have published an article in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that tackles the knotty question of how to change someone’s…