Mark Fields takes the Ford CEO seat July 1, 2014 with the strongest operating inheritance any new Detroit Three CEO has been handed in a generation — and three unresolved communications problems waiting on his desk. Lincoln brand clarity. The China market. The cultural discipline of the Thursday BPR. The transition is the test.
Toyota Connected ingests telemetry from millions of vehicles to power real-time traffic maps, disaster route planning, sensor fusion, and edge computing. How Toyota uses big data at production scale across the connected Toyota and Lexus fleet.
Starbucks runs more sustained philanthropy than most consumer brands at its scale. The College Achievement Plan with Arizona State just landed. Here is the full architecture — the Foundation, Ethos Water, veterans hiring, origin-country investment — and what other brands can learn from it.
If you run a business, you’re concerned with keeping your employees as focused, efficient, and productive as possible. The design of your office space can play a bigger in role in this than you may realize. Old design approaches had rows of cubicles, with workers all toiling away at their desks. When employees spend day after day in a maze of little cubicles, it’s easy to become demoralized. It also leads to wasting time looking for coworkers, trying to find a meeting room, or being distracted by the people chatting in the adjacent cubicle.
2014 hidden-camera caught hotel housekeepers cleaning glasses with toilet-cleaning gloves. Two chains switched to wrapped single-use. Two said 'looking into it.'
Social Media has become an inextricable part of our culture, for better or worse. One thing is for certain: every one of us learned something from social media this past year, whether it was how to spread the word about important issues or how to safeguard our personal data.
The global marketplace we live in has many inherent advantages, and a few stumbling blocks we ought to be aware of. For the unsuspecting marketer, the mistake of applying a blanket strategy to all cultural marketing initiatives is foolhardy.
The biggest single boost a business can give itself right now is showing up inside the AI engines. More than a third of buyers start product research with AI, not Google.
PR practice has evolved significantly across the past decade. Trade press repricing, founder-led publishing, crisis pre-positioning, influencer marketing as core PR, the ESG reset, and the measurement maturity that survives a CFO review. The trends that actually changed the practice.