B2B Marketing
How Companies Actually Increase Sales: The Five Engines of Growth
The five engines that actually drive revenue growth — Visibility, Authority, Distribution, Conversion, Retention. Run them as a system, not as departments.
Tag
AI Communications — Tagged Articles
PR, AI & Communications News
Payments, Fintech and Consumer Trust Center
The EPR Payments, Fintech and Consumer Trust Center. The structural record of how Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Stripe, Block, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna, Affirm, Chime and SoFi build trust, manage reputation, and compete for Citation Share inside the engines that now answer the buyer's question.
AI Communications
2026 PR Budget Benchmarks: What Brands Actually Spend on Communications
Baroness Ashton, the world's highest paid female politician, spends £8.5 million on propaganda, hiring an outside PR firm to illustrate the role of the EU as a global actor in peace building. The move is criticized because she already has two spokesmen, a full time media adviser and a strategic communications director, plus the free use of the European Commission's 909-strong communications staff.
Food & Beverage
Starbucks Partnership Marketing
Starbucks is one of the most active partnership marketers in American consumer retail. The PepsiCo joint venture. The music experiments. The Seattle's Best Burger King deal. The seasonal Girl Scout cookie collaborations. The pattern that explains which partnerships compound and which do not.
Food & Beverage
Starbucks Logo Simplified
Starbucks just simplified its logo, removing the wordmark and centering the siren. The visual change is modest. The strategic statement is large. Why the redesign matters and what brand consultants are going to be referencing for years.
Insights & Strategy
The Power of Naming: How Companies Choose Names
How companies choose brand names — the linguistic, legal, and AI-retrieval tests that decide whether names like OpenAI, Meta, or Tesla win or fail in the answer engines.
Social Media
Social Media PR Failures: The Canonical Cases of 2008–2010
Two years into corporate social-media adoption, the crisis-communications discipline has produced its first canonical cases — Nestlé and Kit Kat, BP and Deepwater Horizon, Toyota's recall, Motrin's baby-wearing ad, Domino's YouTube prank. What each brand got wrong, what a small number got right, and what every comms team should already have built.
Technology
Apple vs Google: The 15-Year Platform War
The 15-year platform war between Apple and Google. iOS vs Android, App Store vs Google Play, Safari vs Chrome, the $20B Google-pays-Apple default-search arrangement, the 2024 antitrust ruling, and the AI assistant era.
AI Communications
Google and the Future of Journalism
Google's relationship with the broader news industry remains one of the more substantial unresolved questions in modern media. The Google News referral economy, the Eric Schmidt public statements, the Rupert Murdoch criticism, the paywall experimentation, and the broader future of journalism conversation that continues to develop.
Social Media
Toshiba's Glasses-Free 3D Television: The First Mover in the Next 3D Cycle
Toshiba announced the first glasses-free 3D television this week — the Regza GL1 series using parallax barrier technology to deliver 3D without requiring glasses. The technology addresses the most-cited consumer objection to current 3D televisions. What it means for the broader 3D television category heading into 2011.