From strategy+business: A more strategic approach to costs can help you prepare for the next round of expansion. Drawing on experience from Ikea, Aetna, Pitney-Bowes, and elsewhere, this step-by-step article shows the three actions that can make a company ready for growth.

From FastCompany: For decades, companies have made you feel inadequate in order to get you to buy things. In an excerpt from his new book Story Wars Jonah Sachs traces the history of the growing field of marketing products in ways that make us better people and the world a better place.

From FastCompany: Shane Snow, founder of Contently, says to win at business, brands need to make content, and make it about their audience.

From strategy+business: Behind many a successful product, there's a sharply focused intention to improve lives. The former global marketing officer of Procter & Gamble describes how he learned to foster a brand's aspirational value.

From Forrester: Our clients tell us that they're eager to use customer journey maps because they see the documents as ideal tools to analyze and communicate their customers' perspectives on the interactions they deliver. However, even enthusiastic organizations sometimes struggle to determine the objectives they should pursue with customer journey mapping. Forrester interviewed five companies that use customer journey maps to understand how the approach has benefited them. This document outlines the business value that these firms derive from customer journey mapping and the variety of objectives that journey mapping can support.

Forrester clients tell us that they're eager to use customer journey maps because they see the documents as ideal tools to analyze and communicate their customers' perspectives on the interactions they deliver. However, even enthusiastic organizations sometimes struggle to determine the objectives they should pursue with customer journey mapping. Forrester interviewed five companies that use customer journey maps to understand how the approach has benefited them. This document outlines the business value that these firms derive from customer journey mapping and the variety of objectives that journey mapping can support.

From Maz Iqbal at Customer Think: Customer-centricity is at least as vague a term as CRM and CEM. Is it a strategy? A state of mind? A loyal relationship?   Personally, I’ve defined “being customer-centric” as delivering value that customers care about. The end results should be more loyal customers.  But it’s not quite that simple. How do we explain the success of Ryanair, which offers a low-cost service, gets lots of travelers and makes money, but can hardly be said to have raving fans?“

From Mind Tools: If you're in marketing, then you'll know how important it is that your brand speaks to your customers on an emotional level. When someone feels a strong positive emotional tie with a product, that emotion creates brand loyalty, and this inspires repeat purchase.

From ChangeThis: For those who work in advertising, simply being fascinated with the future isn’t enough. We have to glean insight from it and process it and wrap it up in a bright shiny message that sells this incrementally better future to the rest of the human race (or, at the very least, our target market), brought to you on behalf of Brand X.

Of course this has never been an easy task. But today, for a number of reasons, advertising the future, and the future of advertising are more difficult and complicated propositions than ever. Because today, not only do advertising people have to fully understand and market the past, present and future of their brands, more than ever they must have a thorough grasp of the seemingly infinite changes that are shaping the future of their industry. This includes everything from the rapidly evolving media landscape to the constant emergence of new messaging delivery vehicles to the very ways in which creative and strategic ideas are developed, shared and created anew.

From FastCompany: Facebook’s newly redesigned Timelines represent a richer creative canvas for brands. Which is great, assuming anyone is visiting. Guest columnists Joshua Teixeira and Victor Piñeiro from Big Spaceship remind marketers to extend their social strategy beyond the Page.

From FastCompany: Faking an authentic experience is now lauded, and companies such as J. Crew are exploiting the trend, writes Michael Raisanen.

From Tom Asacker: My philosophy of brands revolves around the star called "feelings." Not emotions, mind you. I don't subscribe to the brands as emotional connection philosophy. I prefer to view a brand choice as a feelings choice.

From ChangeThis: Let’s face it -- All too often, life is a succession of hassles. There’s an endless array of frustrations, inconveniences, complications, disappointments, and potential disasters lurking in most of our daily experiences. Even very good products and services (we’ll call them simply “products” for simplicity’s sake) have their weaknesses and drawbacks. My new smartphone sometimes drops my calls; my favorite hotel chain sometimes loses my reservation; those new lightbulbs last longer but produce less light; my new hybrid car gets better mileage but the engine feels less peppy… Managers, marketers, designers, service suppliers, and salespeople for the companies that provide these products don’t focus on their weaknesses. That’s understandable. They devote their lives to making products that are as good as they can possibly be and then to promoting them as enthusiastically as they can. Who wants to concentrate on the negatives? Yet we’ve found that organizations that excel at demand creation do exactly that. They examine the lives of customers through the lens of what we call a Hassle Map -- a detailed study of the problems, large and small, that people experience whenever they use their products.

From Knowledge@Wharton: Jerome Chazen, a founder and former chairman of Liz Claiborne, Inc., recently wrote a book titled, My Life at Liz Claiborne: How We Broke the Rules and Built the Largest Fashion Company in the World. Indeed, Liz Claiborne -- now known as Fifth & Pacific Cos. -- grew from revenues of $7 million in 1977 to more than $2 billion in the early 1990s. Knowledge@Wharton asked Chazen, who stepped down as CEO in 1996, to discuss the highs and lows of running a successful fashion business in a highly competitive industry.

From SmartBlogs: Brand stories are no longer limited to blobs of text on “About Us” pages. Social media has given brands a platform to relay their story in multiple ways and to various audiences. At a recent South By Southwest Interactive Festival Panel, Becky Johns, CC Chapman, Charlie Wollborg and Karl Gude, spoke to educate the audience on how to build a visual storyboard that benefits their brands; in essence, how to not just tell a story, but how to tell a good story.

From FastCompany: Brett Lovelady, the man behind Astro Gaming, talks about creating a performance brand in a brutal space where branding was non-existent.

From anecdote: Be careful in your workplace when you ask people to act strategically. How are they viewing that term and what it means? Do they see it as a positive thing, or something a little less savoury?

From Arts Marketing: Chad Bauman writes about his four-and-a-half years at Arena Stage. When one decides to pursue a career in a field they love, like many theater artists I know, these two adjectives are not mutually exclusive; in fact, many would argue that you can't have one without the other. When joining Arena Stage, I knew there were very few precedents for what we needed to accomplish, and with the opening of the Mead Center and a 2.5 year transition ahead of us, a clear path wasn't always available. It was an opportunity that intimidated me, but I knew that I would get an education of a lifetime.

In looking back, I've learned quite a bit along the way

From Stephanie Buck on Mashable: Looking to save some search time and launch into a rich Pinterest experience? We’ve scouted out some of the best Pinners the service has to offer.

From Neil Patel at Quicksprout: HGTV. Nordstrom. West Elm. ModCloth. Those are some of the big name retailers who are using Pinterest to drive significant traffic to their retail websites.

From strategy+business: What is a business strategy? In the first installment of a new monthly s+b column, Booz & Company senior partner Ken Favaro shows why strategy is different from vision, mission, goals, priorities, and plans.

From FastCompany: Designers are beginning to understand how irrational thinking plays into the decisions people make. That knowledge can be used to openly influence consumers to make responsible choices.

From FastCompany: With its new pages redesign and increased avenues for advertisers, Facebook has created another imperative for brands to make better content. To be, in the words of Facebook execs, more like your most interesting friend.

From FastCompany: Step inside any company, no matter the size, stage of development, or level of success, and the culture is either driving the strategy or undermining it.

From Jim Stengel at ChangeThis: It’s time to change the narrative of business. From a winner-take-all tale, no-holds-barred, no matter what the cost to individual firms, investors, the economy, and society, to doing business on the basis of what I call brand ideals, shared ideals of improving people’s lives.

Wider adoption and leveraging of brand ideals would be the best medicine the economy could possibly get. Instead of inflating a bubble that would sooner or later burst with tragic consequences for everyone, it would trigger and sustain unprecedented growth in every sector it touched.

Make no mistake, however. The business case for brand ideals is not altruism. It’s self-interest and mutual interest. In addition to its wider positive impact, a devotion to brand ideals will do more for your own business and career than any other factor. Maximum business growth and high ideals are not incompatible. They’re inseparable.

From FastCompany: Apple has long preached the gospel of minimalist design, and that's been a clever business strategy. But it's one that other companies would be foolish to follow closely.

From FastCompany: In the spectrum between rich, evil corporations and corporations scraping by while adhering to a perfect set of values, a new study has found that there is a set of 25 corporate giants that are managing to succeed while at least making a concerted effort at not destroying anything. And consumers are taking note.

You have the wrong tools. And you use them the wrong way.

It isn’t your fault. You were taught, as we all were, to make forecast models out of past results. You were taught to look in the rear-view mirror. You were also taught to look straight ahead of you. If that competitor was in your line of sight, you had their number. That’s how you knew you were staying ahead.

They were good people that taught you these skills, great professors of the craft in business school, veteran managers and executives in your first, third, and twentieth job. But that was a different time. That was when we could see the future by looking back. Somehow, it made sense back then.

But, now, the rules have changed: our game plans have gone public, and whoever knows what the customer will do next wins.

From ChangeThis: For those of you not familiar with Zappos, the company is an online retailer who defied the odds and built an Internet empire, initially as a virtual shoe store and now expanding its inventory well beyond shoes alone. Zappos has always charged top dollar for its products and has succeeded primarily because the leadership innovated an experience that consistently exceeds the expectations of customers, vendors, and people who simply encounter the brand.

Unlike other failed online vendors from the "dot gone" bust, Zappos invested in both the delivery infrastructure and the corporate culture necessary to produce customer evangelists. To help you appreciate how Zappos might serve as a provocative benchmark for your customer experience, let me give you a few highlights from the 5 principles outlined in The Zappos Experience.

From ChangeThis: Blending art and science is about collaborating in ideas generation: the inter-relationship is critical, you can’t have one thing without the other. A bunch of code or data is just a bunch of numbers without the art.

Science can enable us to be more creative, and creativity allows us to get the most out of our data. But consider ‘the multiplier effect’. If either the data or creative are bad, the idea will fail. It’s not one or the other that we need, it’s both. It’s not science plus art equals results, it’s more science times art, so a zero for either means failure.

That is where the interesting ideas are -- at that intersection. The future is all about ideas connecting. Those who can bridge art and science will be in demand, will be powerful. So if our ideas are going to change hearts and minds, let’s blend them together.

From ChangeThis: We are made to believe that when it comes to business success, bigger is always better. In our super-sized, consumption-oriented culture, not even small business is exempt from the pressure to grow for growth’s sake. … There is an alternative that is both rewarding and attainable -- it just requires rethinking things a bit.

From Fast Company: Evidence points to information from trusted sources getting a better hold on our brains than the noise from everything else. So it's no surprise that companies want to capitalize on those feelings.

From FastCompany: Some companies -- like Patagonia -- thrive on the perception of their sustainability. Others -- like Nike -- keep it in the background. The difference between the reality of sustainability and customers’ perception of it can make or break your company.

From FastCompany: What do "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and Ikea have in common? They both create overtures -- opening sequences that communicate what comes next.

From David Cutler: The fact that many American orchestras struggle to survive is no secret. In the past few years, top-tier ensembles in Philadelphia, Syracuse, Honolulu, Detroit, Louisville, Dallas, and New Mexico have cancelled concerts, issued pay cuts, declared bankruptcy, or closed their doors. Reversing this trend will likely require more than savvier social media use, fundraising efforts, or other one-dimensional potions. Members of the New World Symphony are daring to re-imagine the business model of orchestras from the bottom up.

From trendwatching.com: In 2012, much as in previous years, some brands may be staring into the abyss, while others will do exuberantly well. And while we can’t offer any help to defaulting nations or bankrupt companies, we do believe that there are more opportunities than ever for creative brands and entrepreneurs to deliver on changing consumer needs. From Canada to Korea. Hence this overview of 12 must-know consumer trends (in random order) for you to run with in the next 12 months. Onwards and upwards:

From Tom Asacker: What do people internalize when they interact with you? What image does your idea help them conjure up about themselves? Your audience aches to believe that you “represent” them and that you’re in it for, and with, them. Your ability to reach outside of yourself, and connect with them in a meaningful and reflective way, demonstrates this bond.

From FastCompany: Almost everyone suffers from Gratitude Deficit Disorder. We want to know that we matter, that our efforts make the world a better place. And so do your customers, vendors, coworkers, employees, friends, and family. So make an action plan: what have they done that you're truly thankful for, and how can you communicate your appreciation between now and the end of the year?

From All Facebook: People prefer to follow brands on Facebook rather than Twitter, but a majority follow only two to five brands. The page with the most likes on it is belongs to none other than Facebook — so what the company posts there should serve as examples for how to attract fans and keep them around.

From Julie Rains at OpenForum: I have witnessed a prominent local corporation -- one that will remain anonymous for obvious reasons -- execute its brand promise flawlessly at one location and fumble it ridiculously at another. For years, face-to-face, phone and online experiences fell far short of perfection for this company. Its tagline -- meant to imprint a positive message in the minds of community members -- made me smirk more than smile.

From Seth Godin: Two things every business and non-profit needs to know: 1) How much does it cost you to get one new customer. 2) On average, what's that customer worth over the relationship you have with her?

From John McWade at Before and After: The modern mind thinks in terms of data: “The storm was third wettest in 1996.” But the ancient mind thought in terms of story: “I will send you rain in its season.”

Larry King once asked Ed Bradley if he could explain the longevity of CBS’ 60 Minutes, the most successful program in television history. Mr. Bradley replied that it was because founder Don Hewitt’s guiding directive had been, “Tell me a story.” So storytelling (Once upon a time... ), not reporting (Heat wave claims six), is what 60 Minutes has always done.

From NY Times: The campaign uses abstract imagery to draw attention to
malnutrition in a "more positive, upbeat way" and to attract donations.

From Branding Strategy Insider: In her provocative and quirky book Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon describes how consumers navigate product categories and discern differences among brands within categories. She uses (to great effect) a low involvement category like breakfast cereal to illustrate the process.

From Chief Learning Officer: Best practices have some value, but they’re not the tools your leaders need to chart a path forward in challenging times. “A best practice can be useful, but it is not what creates the future,” said Paul David Walker, a business coach and author of Unleashing Genius: Leading Yourself, Teams and Corporations. “It is especially dangerous in a time of dramatic shifts in paradigms, which is what we’re going through now.”

From strategy+business: Booz & Company’s annual study shows that spending more on R&D won’t drive results. The most crucial factors are strategic alignment and a culture that supports innovation.

From Mitch Joel: The true marketing imperative is to tell a great brand narrative. It's a cohesive story that takes place over time and in different channels. Brands often grapple with how to integrate Digital Marketing and Social Media into their marketing mix because they're consistently working off of a very traditional mass media/broadcasting mindset. Don't get me wrong, there is still plenty of time and space for traditional advertising to help a brand gain attention, traction and mindshare, but what we've really uncovered through the digital channels are more options and different ways to engage, connect, share and grow.

From Fast Company: A new study of consumer engagement finds that companies that aren't making a difference -- to the world and to consumers -- aren't going to be around much longer. Instead of just making your product incrementally better than the competitor, you need to create impact.

From Fast Company: Playground Sessions is a new music learning system from BBH unit Zag. But its biggest lesson may be in how agencies are approaching new product development.

From strategy+business: Booz & Company’s annual study shows that spending more on R&D won’t drive results. The most crucial factors are strategic alignment and a culture that supports innovation.

From Personal Branding Blog: Take a closer look and you’ll find that Steve Jobs left us more than technology, innovation, Apple, Pixar, and powerful corporate branding tips. Jobs imparted powerful personal branding, potentially without knowing it, although I have a sense that Jobs did nearly everything with intention and design, down to choosing those Levis.

From Tom Asacker: People respond to a brand in typically one of three ways: compliance, identification or internalization.

From Garr Reynolds: Steve Jobs had a talent for identifying what was important and what was not, and having the courage to toss what he felt was the nonessential. We see this reflected in the Apple line of products and in the Apple retail stores, and we also see it in Apple's branding and all aspects of their marketing communications. But there was a time when Apple had gotten away from its roots and away from simplicity and clarity, not only in terms of its marketing but in terms of its products too. It took Steve Jobs coming back in 1997 to get the Apple brand back on track after years of neglect. This seven-minute clip below is from an internal presentation that Steve gave in Cupertino to his employees not long after he returned to Apple in 1997. If you are even remotely interested in business or in marketing an organization or cause of any kind in which you truly believe, you need to see this short talk.

From The Ad Contrarian: I pompously call myself The Ad Contrarian, but Steve Jobs was a true ad contrarian. He knew what his company stood for and didn't care what you thought. He assiduously avoided every false turn in the "marketing fad of the month" playbook. Reportedly, the only research he ever did was to ask himself whether he liked something or not.

In his own way, he taught us everything we need to know about advertising. The only problem is, most of us are too blind or too stupid to learn. The thing about magicians is, you see it with your own eyes and you still don't know they did it. Here are 4 things I learned from watching Steve.

From FastCompany: Five questions to ask before deciding whether to invest in a rebranding campaign or pull the plug.

From Stuart Elliot in NY Times: A new campaign for a university is borrowing a page from Dale Carnegie in trying to win friends and influence the influencers. The campaign, now under way, promotes Boston University as a center for world-class research. The image-building campaign, in print and online, is different from the typical campaign from a college or university that is aimed at potential students and their parents. In this instance, the primary target market is so-called thought leaders who influence the rankings on the surveys of best colleges and universities published by the likes of U.S. News and World Report, The Times Higher Education, The Princeton Review and The Fiske Guide to Colleges.

From Fast Company: The companies weathering this storm share basic strategies for reacting to the adverse climate. Each one focuses on reinforcing their value to consumers.

From Success Magazine: More businesses are looking beyond the bottom line these days. What’s more important than P&L? Well, for starters… changing the world.

From Frog Design: Facebook’s creative leadership prefers to develop new features and products based on people and their online behavior, not technology and algorithms — an approach the company calls “social design.” Christopher Cox, vice president of product, defines the concept as improving how people build human-to-human, versus human-to-interface, connections online. Facebook’s social network, he says, is the virtual equivalent of an actual space in which people regularly gather to converse, play, collaborate, and share.

From strategy+business: Three leadership principles turn inherent conflicts into long-term growth.

From strategy+business: The next wave of online business models must focus narrowly, rather than blindly pursuing scale.

From FastCompany: A super-useful infographic detailing everything from the various rungs of Facebook fans to the real secret sauce of Facebook: The math that decides what appears in your latest-news feed.

From emma: What it means to have a reputation online and how you can start actively managing it

From Shawn Callahan at anecdote: “A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy.” -- Ben Horowitz, entrepreneur and investor. A recent global study of 450 enterprises found that 80% of those companies felt their people did not understand their strategies very well. It’s the dirty little secret shared by so many companies: ask any employee about your strategy, including the executive team, and they’ll lunge for a document that tells them. It’s rarely embedded in their minds and, as a result, the espoused strategy does not influence day-to-day decision-making.

From 1to1 Media: "There's never been a more interesting or challenging time in the customer service business," inContact CMO Mariann McDonagh told attendees of the company's Problem Solved tour in New York yesterday. McDonagh warned that it will only get more difficult to differentiate brands based on product attributes; driving sustainable growth more and more requires a superior service experience. "The next five years will bring more changes to the customer service market than the past 15."

From ChangeThis: CEOs and board members routinely list reputation as one the company’s most valuable assets. Yet, every month a new reputational disaster makes the headlines destroying shareholder value and trust with customers and other stakeholders. During the last year leading companies ranging from Toyota, Goldman Sachs, BP to HP and Johnson & Johnson battled severe reputational crises. In recent weeks we have witnessed not only the devastating earthquake and Tsunami in Japan, but also the so far futile response of Tepco, the nuclear operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. […]

Trust is now an essential part of business success. Yet trust in U.S. business has substantially dropped over the last decade. While trust in business is still higher in developing countries, Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are on a par with businesses in emerging markets and more trusted in developed markets including the United States. These data suggest that business can no longer rely on a trust reservoir. Rather trust needs to be earned.

Companies have not responded to these changes. Their reputational risk has increased dramatically, but their capabilities have stayed the same. The result is one crisis chasing another and the long-term erosion of public trust in private enterprise.”

From Knowledge@Wharton: Online group buying sites are experiencing rapid growth in all areas, from partner businesses to subscribers to revenues. Venture capitalists are actively investing in the sites, which is driving up business valuations. But that "wild exuberance" is miscalculated, warns Wharton marketing professor David Reibstein in an interview with Knowledge@Wharton. Taking Chicago-based Groupon as a case in point, he says the industry's current growth rates are unsustainable, and its business model is flawed.

From Seth Godin: No organization cares about you. Organizations aren't capable of this.

From FastCompany: Multi-tasking is humanly impossible. What your brand needs is a simplified marketing message -- that you can sum up in one word.

From Stanford Social Innovation Review: The value of narrative in your organization extends well beyond telling stories in your annual report and newsletters. When an organization embraces narrative and applies it throughout its work, brand identity is clear and appealing; audiences are quickly and sustainably engaged; leaders appreciate and strategically share stories; and knowledge is easily gathered and shared.

From FastCompany: All-star designer Gadi Amit argues that imagining a brand as products a company doesn't make tells you all you need to know about its future business prospects.

From The 1to1 blog: Think about all the ways you communicate digitally today: You email via computer, probably via smartphone, and perhaps even via netbook or tablet. You send and receive text messages. If you have a smartphone, you may use QR codes to get product information. If you're a gamer, marketers may reach you via in-game messaging. You may have a Mac, BlackBerry, iPad, and Xbox. Or perhaps you have an HP EliteBook, an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy Tab. You may have some other mix of devices.

"Each consumer is a unique combination of channels and devices," Vice President and Gartner Fellow Mark Raskino said during his keynote at the Gartner CRM Summit 2011 last week in London. "The challenge is to reach them accordingly."

From Jon Burg's Future Visions: 1) Social media is fueled by real people with real concerns. 2) You cannot turn off the conversation. 3) Social media isn't a technology. 4) Your target market doesn't live in a vacuum. 5) The pace of change has changed.

From Michael Steizner at Social Media Examiner: In this video I interview Jeff Hayzlett, former CMO of Kodak and author of The Mirror Test. Jeff explains what the mirror test is and how this can help you establish your brand online. You’ll also learn about the hot concept of the 118 rule and how to create the digital version of your elevator pitch.

From strategy+business: Some companies' hapless responses to accidents and other incidents have made business seem untrustworthy, yet the value of a good corporate reputation has grown more important to the public. Companies must put strategies in place to safeguard their reputation and their brands.

From strategy+business: Business strategy is at an evolutionary crossroads. It's time to resolve the long-standing tension between the inherent identity of your organization and the fleeting nature of your competitive advantage.

From Ernan Roman in ChangeThis: “I define real marketing as follows: treating customers and prospects the way we want to be treated, and earning the sale and the long term relationship through the value we provide. Traditional marketing based on ‘Spray and Pray’ blasts of mail, email, phone calls, and so on, not only doesn’t work, but is also obscenely wasteful.”

From M.P. Mueller at NY Times: nother year — that time when we turn a critical eye to what worked and what didn’t last year. So let’s give some attention to the foundation of all good marketing efforts: interpersonal communication. Think of traditional marketing as air cover but personal communications as the sales maker that wins customers and keeps clients happy and loyal.

From Copyblogger: There are countless blogs and articles on the web that proclaim the importance of building a unique brand. But how, exactly, do you create a brand that’s irresistible to your audience and positions you as an authority? And how do you do it if you’ve never built one before?

From accenture: In a growing number of organizations, marketing is assuming a commanding new role — not only executing strategy but increasingly shaping it as well. As these leading growth companies redefine the marketing function, they are focusing on four key areas of competency.

From Andrew Taylor: Too many of our current discussions about new business models and funding structures for arts and culture take it as a given that the organization is the appropriate frame of reference. How can we make arts organizations more vital, more responsive, more sustainable? As if the organization is some universal unit of measure, and always the best unit for understanding and advancing positive change.

In fact, the idea of an organization is a fiction -- a useful fiction to be sure, but a fiction nonetheless. It's a group of resources and people, bound by contract or other agreement, and credentialed by a web of city, state, Federal, and common law. Organizations evolved to solve a particular set of problems. And even though the problem set has changed, our organizational bias remains.