Our thinking appears in marketing articles and publications around the world

Prophet contributed to the 70th anniversary of the GfM (Swiss Marketing Association) through 7 articles published in their symposium. Articles in English and in German

Jay Milliken and Andres Nicholls discuss how strategy-led design and understanding customer behavior are the key elements for the success of Emart.

The ability to create and manage the customer experience is something more businesses would like to get right. It's an attainable goal. All it takes is the mindset combined with consistent and thoughtful deployment of tools that allow customer experiences to be monitored and optimized. 

Retailers have always been driven by the seasons. The holidays, of course, and particularly Christmas. Fall and back to school. The ushering-in of spring and summer, with promotions around fun and leisurely pursuits. Since the recession officially reared its head in January of 2008, retailing has added a new season to its lineup: The “season of discontent.”

The National Hockey League is a remarkable turnaround story serving as a lesson for brand reinvention.

Luxury brands face no small dilemma these days as they try to deliver growth without compromising cachet—all against the backdrop of a severe global recession that’s sure to challenge their fabled resistance to downturns.

Peter Dixon shares the kind of thinking that helps businesses transform – whatever the economic conditions.

Individual brands, or even whole categories, that were once important for a particular consumer segment, become irrelevant as society evolves and tastes change. Should you completely lose your current brand equity association so you can become relevant to new consumers?

Joseph Gelman argues that the concept of bank branches is still alive, despite claims to the contrary. Banks should therefore take advantage of this situation to transmit the essence of their brand to clients at all points of interaction, particularly in light of the current cash crisis.

CMOs can no longer invest in traditional marketing channels. They must focus their marketing dollars on customer touchpoints that create the greatest opportunity to generate sustainable brand value.  *Please note, this article is in German.

In this article, Scott Davis answers questions about customer control: Does the customer really want to be your co-pilot? Does the customer want to do the marketer’s work in building the brand? Make your ads? Design your products? Distribute your message? Maybe not, he argues.

This article was co-authored with our client, UBS, and has been translated into English from the original German text. It illustrates how active touchpoint management can help in converting prospects to clients, extending relationships to existing clients and therefore driving business results.

In the environment where you can reach your customers 24/7, success at building a brand—at solidifying and growing your relationship with customers—is really all about being selective. You need to pick the right time and place or, better yet, let the customer pick for you.

Color today’s marketers dazed and confused. It’s an understandable reaction to an environment that has become almost impossibly complex, making it difficult for them to figure out where to start (or much less how to go about) meeting management’s escalating demands for demonstrable returns.

In this article, Scott discusses the challenges being faced by Senior Marketers and four key mandates they should address on the path toward becoming empowered CMOs.

In this article, Scott discusses the need for marketers to take a broader view of their role if they are to contribute successfully to business growth. This includes thoughts around owning the customer experience, successfully using new technologies, and blending business, brand, and marketing strategies.

After years of paying lip service to the importance of marketing while engineering and design ruled the roost, technology companies are learning that maybe they need to be more like other businesses after all.

Despite marketing's lingering reputation in some senior management circles as the function that is more interested in spending money than bringing it in, top-level marketers increasingly understand they share the same mandate as their peers in the executive suite: To help drive profitable business growth.

When it comes to assessing marketing's effectiveness in creating the type of customer relationships that fuel business growth, consider this: Maybe marketers should stop thinking so much like traditional marketers.

Marketers aiming to better position themselves and the marketing function to add real value to the organization have their work cut out for them. A new year makes the timing right to recap three of the most critical prescriptions for change.