Marketing

Marketing

Where are your competitors spending their marketing money? Gyi and Conrad's insights into this valuable data can help you stay ahead of the rivals in your market.

The nearly 6-foot-long swabs, called Quge-tips, feature in a parody of TV infomercials where a fictional spokesperson, Bruce Neptune, shows off a variety of applications, from dusting off heaps of pollen to cleaning up a crime scene. Quge-tips are available at a website for $35 a piece while supplies last. Q-tips has enlisted the help of other brands, including Doritos and Goodyear, and content creators to get the word out on social media.

As advertisers do the difficult work to reduce their own emissions, many are turning to another, and possibly even larger, opportunity to have a positive impact on the planet - the messages they choose for their ads. Advertising has the power to positively influence consumer behavior, and every brand can and should consider how their creative work can deliver on that promise.

AI chat assistants are not being used the way many marketers expect. Instead of acting as shopping tools or search engines, they function primarily as support systems for cognitive tasks - writing, planning, analyzing and learning, according to a report by AI SEO agency Dejan. In 2026, optimizing for AI means understanding how users actually engage with assistants, not just assuming commercial behavior.

Marketers frequently champion the idea of "customer loyalty." However, much of what is labeled as "loyalty" may not be authentic. For years, brands have patted themselves on the back for retention numbers that look impressive on dashboards. But the truth is far more uncomfortable. A large portion of what we call "loyalty" is simply inertia disguised as affection. Customers aren't staying because they love us. Many are staying because leaving feels like a chore.

As consumer behaviors shift and digital touchpoints multiply, the once-reliable linear marketing funnel is giving way to a far more dynamic customer journey. Audiences now move fluidly between channels, influence sources and brand interactions, often looping back or skipping steps entirely. To stay competitive, brands must embrace a more adaptive, experience-driven approach that meets customers where they are-whenever and however they choose to engage.

CMSWire's Marketing & Customer Experience Leadership channel is the go-to hub for actionable research, editorial and opinion for CMOs, aspiring CMOs and today's customer experience innovators.

If you've followed my posts here on MarTech or heard me speak about behavioral science in email marketing, you know that I focus on designing messages that align with the way people make decisions. The Four Buyer Modalities - Competitive, Methodical, Spontaneous and Humanistic - are the backbone of that approach. Each reflects a distinct cognitive style that shapes how people interpret information, weigh risk and build confidence before a purchase.

It's been a year defined by rapid innovation, and experiential marketers certainly found new ways to amplify brand moments with technology: a smartwatch that can guide you to a new favorite artwork, better tee shot predictions, an immersive keynote address.

Anshuman Dutta is a marketing director at . Influences global audiences on tech, identity and society. In an era of information overload and declining trust, one politician's communication strategy offers unexpected lessons for business marketers. Zohran Mamdani, a New York State Assembly member representing Astoria, Queens, and the mayor-elect of New York City, has built a devoted following not through compromise or moderation, but through radical clarity.

They just stop responding. They ghost you. They leave your deck unread. They click away from your site and never come back. That's what happens when tone breaks trust. It's silent. Instant. And it's nearly impossible to track. It doesn't matter how smart your product is, how big your ambition is, or how clean your UI looks-if the way you sound feels off, it introduces just enough doubt to lose someone.

In the digital age, executive reputation is one of the biggest brand success factors. It impacts everything from brand sentiment, trust and equity to its market value. Why? Positive executive visibility can boost investor confidence, influence media sentiment and increase customer and employee loyalty. Yet there's been a steep trust decline: 68% of people globally believe business leaders "purposely mislead people." And when social media gives crisis moments a viral megaphone, it becomes even more challenging to achieve and maintain a positive reputation.

Editor's note: People are asking questions about the new Local Love Los Alamos & White Rock Initiatiive by Places and Spaces Los Alamos. Photos and publicity connecting local businesses to the community, commuters and vsitors are appearing online, drawing attention to local commerce opportunities. With the holiday shopping season in full swing, readers are excited to learn about opportunities to make purchases locally that they hadn't even realized were an option.

From "chockablock" to a "full Monty," the Brits have a wide range of interesting slang words. You don't want to be described as "dim," "a mug," or "a few sandwiches short of a picnic." If you're "zonked" or "cream crackered," you might want to take a nap. Americans might want to mind the gap when it comes to discerning what these British phrases actually mean.

If you're still debating whether answer engine optimization (AEO) belongs in your go-to-market strategy, you are already behind the curve. From January to May 2025, website traffic from AI-powered platforms surged more than 500%. And at a recent CMO roundtable I co-hosted in Boston, leaders agreed on one thing: how your brand appears in AI-generated responses now shapes how buyers perceive your company, evaluate your executives and categorize your product or service.

Though marketing and PR are different, they complement each other by working together to shape a brand's narrative (PR) and drive business and sales goals (marketing). One tool once championed mostly by PR professionals is now a go-to for marketers as well: the press release. When it comes to communicating messages to the public, a well-structured press release not only gets your news out, but also garners media coverage and the attention of AI systems.

NextEra Energy on Monday tightened its grip on hyperscaler power demand, adding 2.5 GW of new renewable projects for Meta while deepening its partnership with Google, which already covers about 3.5 GW of capacity. Taken together, Meta and Google now touch roughly 18 percent of the 33.4 GW of generating capacity in operation at NextEra Energy's subsidiary, NextEra Energy Resources, underscoring both the growing appetite for datacenter power and the consolidation of supply among hyperscale customers.

Experimentation in marketing is almost a century old, and there have been some world changing examples along the way. Pepsodent toothpaste got the ball rolling by testing the effectiveness of magazine and newspaper ads in the 1920s using nothing more than coupon copy. Predictably, it took a science-based company to pioneer these first A/B split tests and Google use exactly the same principles today to optimise AdWords. And how can anyone overlook the impact that the first Pepsi Challenge taste test had in 1975?

In December, when Under Armour hosted its first investor day in five years, along with sharing its final quarter results that posted $1.4bn in revenue in 2024, its chief executive officer, Kevin Plank, unveiled plans to "fortify" the brand. It has divided the new strategy into four pillars: product, story, service and team. Sitting within the 'story' pillar are changes to Under Armour's marketing strategy.

When it comes to market segmentation, I don't see truly well-documented cases often. At a more simplistic level, we think of classic matrices such as BCG or McKinsey's. But the real exercise of segmentation is far more complex. In certain contexts, it comes close to the behavior of a tensor: multiple dimensions, cross-dependencies, distinct weights, temporality, and contextual factors that shift the meaning of data depending on the axis being analyzed.

Sir Martin Sorrell is Founder and Executive Chairman of S4 Capital plc, the tech led, new age / new era digital advertising and marketing services company for global, multinational, regional and local clients, and millennial-driven influencer brands. Sir Martin was Founder and CEO of WPP for 33 years, building it from a £1 million 'shell' company in 1985 into the world's largest advertising and marketing services company.

Short-form videos at varying lengths have been popularized across a variety of digital surfaces over the past few years. The shortest of these videos, hovering in the 15-second range, present a particularly compelling option for law firm marketing funnels because they have the potential to grab potential customers' attention quickly and convey an impression of value founded in legal acumen within a comparably short period of time.

The Chicago office has added Leah Hattendorf, senior vice president-planning, and Matt Sulzer, creative director. Hattendorf steps into a critical role leading the insights community, delivering on the agency's realistics process for clients and prospects. She was most recently at the creative Chicago shop The Escape Pod, and before that at JWT New York, DDB and FCB Chicago. Her client background is a match for Current, with CPG, food, home and insurance expertise.

"Affordability" has become business's favorite new buzzword - and for good reason. US inflation remains high, alongside pricing on everyday household expenses. As a result, countless studies show that it's top of mind for the vast majority of people - driving decision-making across demographics. In the fast casual space in particular, affordability has been cited as a factor in ongoing slumps, but across the quick-service landscape, a clear strategy is taking shape.

Replying to comments on your LinkedIn posts can boost engagement by around 30%, according to a massive analysis by Buffer's data scientist, Julian Winternheimer. Julian analyzed 72,000 LinkedIn posts from nearly 25,000 accounts, and the pattern was clear: When creators engage back in their comments, their posts perform significantly better relative to their own baseline. This is one of my favorite data analyses we've done at Buffer, because it's hard evidence that giving back goes a long way.