The blog

Some weeks ago, when driving my car, I was listening to the radio. The newsreader was talking about a contest in The Netherlands called “The Golden Windegg”, a competition organized by the “Foodwatch” organization. As a company you particularly hope not to be nominated for this award, and if you are, you cross your fingers in the hope that you don’t win the prize for most misleading product of the year. The “lucky” winner of the Golden Windegg 2015 was Albert Heijn, for their cranberries. Although these cranberries are sold as so-called “superfoods”, they consist of 68% added syrup and contain only 30% real cranberries. Needless to say, this is a prize the store should not be proud of.

A while ago I read a blogpost about HelloFresh, a company that delivers recipes with all the pre-measured ingredients to your door each week. Ingenious service, you might think, but what actually got me to read the post was its rather offensive title, including the word Foodjehovas... What happened to the author was that he decided to cancel his subscription, and that's when it all went south.

There is a group of digital entrepreneurs earning millions of dollars by making efficient use of modern digital marketing strategies. I learned lots from them and you could, too.

Snapchat is hot! The instant messaging app that allows you to send photos or videos (these are the ‘Snaps’ in Snapchat) that can only be seen by the receiver for a maximum of 10 seconds, has reached 6 billion daily video views worldwide. More importantly, Belgium is the country with the second highest usage of Snapchat amongst youngsters, with 46% of teens using the app. (Webindex, 2015)

The House of Marketing attended two inspiring international marketing conferences: the DMA conference &THEN in Boston and the Web Summit in Dublin. During these events we participated in exhaustive workshops, attended inspiring lectures and gained a lot of new insights in order to stay at the forefront of marketing. We clustered our insights in an inspirational presentation:

The New Year greetings are getting behind us, the year kicked off at full speed. Welcome to 2016! 2015 was without a doubt an exciting year. Marketing evolved faster than ever. New technologies and the increased expectations of consumers forced marketers to reinvent themselves in terms of new marketing and business models.

Ever dreamed of being the Nº 1 Company in the minds of your customers? Maybe even just for a minute? Today, being really successful is a major challenge for many companies. Customers are more demanding and hyper-connected. As a result, companies struggle to catch their attention. On top of that, customer interest fades quickly, which doesn’t make things any easier! This means that companies need to create a memorable customer experience. Nevertheless, some companies are doing well and are achieving buzz and curiosity for their brand by using new technologies, such as augmented reality, virtual reality and 3D printing.

Who doesn’t feel cheerful after watching the ads by Milka featuring a purple milk cow, or Mr Clean’s muscular and tanned handy man, Energizer’s restless bunny or Nespresso’s seductive and well-known actor, George Clooney? And these are just a few examples of brands that have successfully used a personalized character or well-known figure as brand ambassador.

Do you also have the feeling we are not doing enough to really help for example the Syrian refugees? I believe that we should structure our efforts to support people in need and that marketers are in the perfect position to take the lead. The five key rules from Music For Life I hand here can enable marketers to set up a campaign and create real impact.

After working for two and a half years at The House of Marketing, I felt the need to express why I love being a THoMer! Here are my 8 reasons why I’m happy to work at The House of Marketing: