Chief Marketer Staff

• People in the News

  Denver, Co-based Cultivator Advertising & Design, named Jeremy Pruitt senior graphic designer, working on the Red Robin Gourmet Burger and Anthony’s Pizza accounts.

• News Briefs

  GAP INC.: named Marka Hansen as president of Gap North America last week. Hansen moves to the flagship retail chain Gap from sister chain Banana Republic. She replaces Cynthia Harriss, who resigned after three years leading the chain. Hansen has been …

• Agencies

  The First Five Commandments of Database Content Management

  (Multichannel Merchant) Myriad methods exist to turn data into actionable insight. Examples include statistics-based predictive models, homogeneous groupings (also known as clusters), cohort analyses such as lifetime value,

• Agencies

  Adding a Persona Touch

  (Multichannel Merchant) Ask anyone at women’s apparel cataloger/retailer Appleseed’s to describe Kate, and they will tell you that Kate is a baby boomer, a mother — maybe even a grandmother — who is active in her community

• Zero Switching Costs Are Here

  (Multichannel Merchant) Why did Google pay $1.65 billion for YouTube? Why did Tom Freston lose the CEO job at MTV parent company Viacom? The same reason that Google outpaced Yahoo!,

• What’s in a Name: Four Key Criteria

  One reason naming a business or a product is so hard: Everyone thinks it’s easy. Saying everything you need to in a few letters or syllables is, in fact, not easy.

• Marketing Leadership: Leading a Team Through Change

  If leadership is an art, then following is an art too. I was reminded of this recently when I wanted our team to do something different with our corporate newsletter to kick off the new year.

• Agencies

  Borrow a Page from Your E-Mail Playbook

  Which marketing buzzword is getting more tired: “customer-centric” or “multichannel”? You can’t attend a conference on marketing or management these days without the speakers repeating these phrases ad nauseam.

• Review and Renew

  Multichannel merchants today face two fundamental challenges: Customer loyalty is declining, and competition is increasing. While these are forces that all businesses grapple with

• Kill These Buzz Phrases–Please

  Want to know why marketers are always the first to get canned when the economy tanks? Because too many of them use empty-headed words and phrases in a lame attempt to mask that they really can’t measure much of what they’re doing.

  As the old saying in the accounting department goes, “When things get tough and it’s time for layoffs, divert attention from the fact that we have too many bean counters by pointing out that marketing can’t account for most of what it does.” Okay, that’s not a saying, but it is a philosophy that most of us see in our careers at one time or another.