It's always good with empirical references, and positive news. This piece (in Swedish) is about BMW and a insurance company during the last recession 2001. BMW Sweden choosed to gain their marketing budget, and the result was an increase of about 27% on the marketing spend on each sold car. This in turn resulted in increased sales for about 10-15% for this period, depending on the model. Obviously they had lots of advantages after the recession as they grabbed market shares and changed the perception of the brand for their new audience.  

A perfect example on the theories about the possibilities to get advantages during these times. And not to hold back too much.   

Tags: marketing in a recession, bmw, possibilities

This fantastic ideagram evolves here. 

Tags: problem solving, visualization, marshall clemens

At the moment, we are in the process of improving the use of forms in Yooba Studio. One of the features that we are adding is the ability to add animations and effects to form objects. It will also be possible to customize the look and feel of the error message that appears when form validation fails, as well as using icons to indicate forms that are invalid.
 
In the process of enabling animation on forms, we also made improvements to the way animation is handled. As a result, the next version will have much smoother and nicer-looking animations.

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We're slowly starting to reach out to more and more potential users. And so far it's going really well. In fact, the feedback is really overwhelming and very inspirational. But occasionally, not often, we meet these stubborn, and almost rejective persons who clearly see us as a threat. And when I say clearly, I do it from a quasi-psychological perspective. But it can't be anything else than psychology. I have the biggest respect for anyone's professional integrity, or professional role.

But as we've, and many others, have stated before, times are getting harder and the for the majority of us it's about adapting to the forthcoming state of the market. Very few will be able to do what they've always done, at least for the next few years.  Till then you won't have the resources to re-invent the wheel. You need to look around for smart and effective solutions. And there's loads of them. I'm writing this from our perspective, being one service provider, but I'd still like to leave that behind. As I've stated in the headline, this has something to do with psychology and I'm not trying to push any sales messages here. So what's it going to take till anyone; marketer, artist creative person etc., leaves their integrity behind and starts think a bit more rationally?

I presume for anyone, it's about being able to pay the bills. To enable that through these dark times you might need to get some help. Not change what you do today, just look at other ways to complement your work to bring in new ideas. To adapt your services, offerings to what might just work perfectly in the forthcoming years, and still being able to do that in the same artistic ways that you've always done.

I'd say, that's creativity.

Tags: technology, creativity, recession,

There's a quite interesting concept at http://www.wepc.com/ where Intel and Asus will create the first community designed laptop. Anyone can bring ideas on what would become a "Dream PC". The results, there are three various categories, won't become a mish-mash of lots of community based ideas though. It's about influencing the design and functionality where ASUS will evaluate the feedback for the blueprint.

A good idea, which might work. On the other hand these passionate users could also be a very critical and cynical targetgroup where consensus is rarely seen. Unless we talk about Apple-stuff, that is. 

Tags: consumer generated content, design, asus, intel,