Apple Fanboy = Religious Fanatic?

When you stick a big Apple fan in an fMRI machine and show him Apple images, his brain lights up in the same areas associated with religious belief. And, according to a BBC TV show, one of the scientists associated with that study proclaims, “big tech brands have harnessed, or exploit, the brain areas that [...]

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Why Etsy’s Rob Kalin Is Like Steve Jobs

You might think that Etsy founder Rob Kalin doesn’t have much in common with Apple’s rock star CEO, Steve Jobs. Inc. magazine’s Max Chafkin describes Kalin as “socially awkward, reticent, and given to eccentricities that can seem downright crazy.” Chafkin goes on to quote Kalin:

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Rivalry Marketing

Sometimes the best thing for a brand is an enemy: a rival brand that can be the focus of advertising. The other day, Mark Gallagher and Laura Savard at the BlackCoffee blog put the advantage of focusing on a rival succinctly:

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Top Neuromarketing Posts of 2010

This is the time of year for “top” lists, and I thought I’d list the most popular Neuromarketing posts for 2010. This list isn’t my opinion of which are best, but rather is based purely on popularity. These posts all generated some combination of social media traffic from Twitter, Facebook, and Stumbleupon as well as [...]

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We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Marketing

The comments on “Revealed: How Steve Jobs Turns Customers into Fanatics” show that many Apple fans don’t believe marketing has played a role in Apple’s success. Other consumers also think they aren’t influenced by ads. When a business owner or key executive doesn’t believe in marketing, though, it’s a different story.

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Revealed: How Steve Jobs Turns Customers into Fanatics

Marketers gaze in envy at brands like Apple. The firm that began with the Mac built some of the first home computers [doh, thanks, alert reader!] has turned their customers into legions of fanatical evangelists. But, without a Steve Jobs at the helm, or with fewer resources than Apple, is building that kind of loyalty [...]

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Decoding CEO Faces

The basic concept of facial coding is that a trained observer can detect fleeting facial movements that indicate the true emotions that the subject is experiencing, even if the subject is trying to conceal those emotions. I’ve written about the process of interpreting these facial expressions in the past, notably in Facial Coding and Emotionomics. [...]

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