Bob Deutsch

Opinion
21 September 2011 If there were any sleep-plaguing doubts that designers matter, the recent crash of Target’s website as it debuted its collaboration with Missoni should help you rest easy. Yes, the real-world votes are tallied, and designers seized the day and took the web platform with them.
Opinion
07 February 2011 Creativity and innovation are critical to corporations. This is as true of a corporation's strategy development as it is for product development. This is true for how a company thinks about itself, as much as how it conceives of the world at large. Given the new economic environment, it's time to review the conventional wisdom about business, brands, and consumers, and to recognize that rewarding innovation is the only way forward.
Opinion
02 February 2011 In today's socially-mediated world, marketers must place greater emphasis on understanding their audience as people instead of simply describing them as consumers. Just satisfying consumers' immediate wants creates a commodity, not a brand. Clients want more. They want to impress a brand footprint across all media channels and platforms. They want more than a tally of click-throughs.
Opinion
08 September 2010 Creativity and innovation are critical to corporations. This is as true of a corporation’s strategy development as it is for product development. This is true for how a company thinks about itself, as much as how it conceives of the world at large. It’s time to review the conventional wisdom about business, brands, and consumers and to recognize that rewarding creativity is the only way forward. The cognitive processes creative people engage in to create meaning are common across cultures and hierarchies. Let’s explore twelve keys to unlocking creativity in the business world.
Opinion
08 September 2010 Fun and happiness, partly because of their scarcity, are hot topics. Today life is hard, in new ways. In addition to the economic downturn, people experience life as TOO fast, TOO complex, and TOO competitive. Everyone is rushed. Everyone is pulled in many directions.
Opinion
17 May 2010 Recession, war and terrorism have shaken the pillars of American optimism. We, the people, are hesitantly scratching our heads and wondering how all this happened? We are justifiably cynical about the state of corporate sincerity.
Opinion
26 April 2010 A person's sense of time and its relation to one's sensitivity to sensual experience are critical to their appreciation of luxury. This being the case, the major focus of luxury marketers should be the in-store experience.  This is where luxury products and their presentation can best be admired.  The implications are three-fold:
Opinion
13 April 2010 "Brand" had been with us since human time began. Millennia before marketing coined the term "branding," the how, when, and why of people "attaching" to a person, product, or idea, has been nothing less than the engine of history. Marketers would do well to look at how the human attachment process operates from the point of view of "people", rather than "consumers".
Opinion
31 March 2010 Happiness is a hot topic these days. Scholars have recently noted some non-intuitive dynamics as to what makes people happy, and, of course, Americans are always in the pursuit of happiness.
Opinion
10 March 2010 Technology is great but we must not forget that the future has an ancient, living heart. Human nature keeps that vital organ pumping in search of hope, predictability, and comfort.
Opinion
01 March 2010 Life now is fast, very fast. Everyone rushes to get to the next better, whatever. The future is NOW. One has to run just to stand in place. Nothing is left on the vine to mature naturally. Everything is plucked hard and green.
Opinion
12 February 2010 In my work as a cognitive anthropologist I study how the mind works, how people "make meaning," how people form attachments to things, how people make decisions.  Decisions like how to select what to invest in, whether stocks or mates; why and under what conditions, people prefer Coke over Pepsi (or vice versa), Charmin over Cottonelle; why a person believes in one God over another.
Opinion
03 February 2010 The first Baby Boomers will turn 65 in 2011. In the US alone, more than 3.5 million babies were born in 1946. Volumes have been written about the Vietnam-era proclivities and behaviors of this post-WWII cohort. In contrast, our conception of Seniors - what Boomers soon will be - is highly stereotyped.
Opinion
25 January 2010 As we age our nostalgic yearnings grow, making us more receptive to advertisers and marketers use of what researchers call "a longing for positive memories from the past." In addition to time's arrow, this desire for nostalgia is further intensified by society's present circumstance of receding predictability and opportunity.
Opinion
18 January 2010 It can be said that creative advertising is like brain surgery.  When advertising is artfully done it cures people of the status quo by activating neural circuitry. To be creative artfully requires a dynamic mix of imagination and understanding of how the world might work.  This is not a matter of being correct, but rather a matter of making the audience wonder, provoking a self-referring reverie that elicits an expanded idea of oneself and how the world works.  As a result, we see anew.
Opinion
07 January 2010 THE PURCHASE FUNNEL ISN'T CURVACEOUS ENOUGH