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Market research is a friend of conservatism. It justifies caution and pisses on creativity and ambition.

People respond to market research in terms of what they know. They answer questions on the world around them. It doesn’t deal with concepts and ideas that they have never encountered.

Market research will create entertainment that 50 per cent of people will definitely enjoy over entertainment that 10 per cent of people will definitely enjoy but which 80 per cent might adore. It makes people play safe. It rounds off rough edges and steers people towards safe certainties and away from things that could be dramatic successes or failures.

I hate it.

You know why? Because you don’t get to decide whether it’s viral or not. The viral part of the ‘viral video’ term is entirely out of your hands.

A video only becomes viral and it does so when more and more people start sharing it via the web. A video is not made viral and cannot deliberately be made viral. No one individual can render something viral.

You can hope that a video becomes viral and you can try and manufacture the kind of thing that you hope will become viral, but you cannot release a viral video. It is, by definition, impossible.

Yes.

Of course it does.

Maybe it’s not so apparent if you have a two-week work placement in the industry and you’re only doing some filing, but the time spent in marketing will still have led to a certain corrosion of the soul.

Simply being in that environment – having people thinking about how to exploit other people all around you for two full weeks – you’re bound to suffer a little.

It’s most apparent in the careerists though – those people dedicated to the hollow art of foisting unwanted products on disinterested parties. You can see it in these people’s eyes and clothes. Mostly the clothes.

Tokyo has been witness to a new generation of drinks machines over the last few months, which feature a technology so advanced it can cater it’s marketing to the current user.

The ‘Acure’ vending machine features a 47-inch touch screen instead of the traditional glass front display and also sports  a digital camera. The camera is used to assess the user’s age and gender when using them. This automated analysis can then be sued to target different products to different age groups or sexes. It can also store demographic data over time in order to rank products that are more popular and give them more prominence. Think of it like Skynet (Terminator reference), without the nukes and aggressive personality.

The Acure is currently used to offer beverages, but could distribute other product types in future. Although it’s not like to be replacing standard drinks machines any time soon, it does offer up to six times more sales according to initial results from a report from the test run. The report also supports the fact that the Acure may makes its way over to the United Kingdom within a year’s time, so remember to keep smiling when you go to buy your Diet Coke.

Whatever sector your business is operating in, it’s highly likely that you’re still feeling the effects of the credit crunch, and recent Government proposals regarding spending cuts and recovery have no doubt left you feeling a little wary.

However, even when you’re keeping a close eye on your spending, you can’t afford to put marketing activity on the back burner, and you need to ensure that your brand is at the forefront of your target audience’s mind.

You might be thinking that this will involve spending thousands on promotional materials, offers and advertisements, although it really doesn’t have to if you’re prepared to put your creative thinking cap on.

If the design and print of your company’s promotional materials is outsourced to an expensive external company, bringing the job in house can help to cut costs whilst ensuring that you are maintaining your presence in the market.

Attending events and trade shows is also a great way of achieving brand visibility, and if you’re feeling lucky, you might even be able to blag discounts for exhibiting- especially if you have several staff attending.

Lastly, ensuring that all staff have professional, well-designed business cards is very important, and can help you to gain and keep in contact with useful new contacts.

Viral marketing involves making some quirky content and hoping people latch onto it, distributing it to friends. It’s so-named because of the way it spreads like a virus, with everyone exposed to it a potential disseminator.

I hate the concept, not because of the power of it or because of any questions of its efficacy, but because of the notion that you can engineer the viral quality.

Sure, it’s something to aim for, but to claim that you can carry out viral marketing is a big and inaccurate boast. The truth is, very few pieces of content become viral and as soon as you try and identify the qualities needed, you destroy them.

Viral content almost always comes about naturally and very rarely is it anything other than purely altruistic. Mostly it’s just pointless shit. Attach a point to pointless shit and you negate it.

A lot of traditional marketing companies fundamentally DO NOT GET how marketing works on the internet. They see that you have some web space and they treat it like it’s BBC primetime TV.

The important thing to remember about web marketing is that is primarily about getting people onto your site in the first place. Yes, you need to have everything set up so that they can then buy things, but writing sales copy on your blog is no good to anybody. Ask yourself this: why would somebody willingly seek out that article and read it?

If you have a blog, use it to write useful articles that people might be searching for. No-one is looking for sales copy online and even if they find it, it’ll turn them off.

Yesterday I spoke about how certain TV adverts are targeted at certain viewers and appear in certain programmes overly frequently. Generally, this is bad. Sometimes it works.

The example I would give is the Just For Men ad with a frumpy daughter and a dad going for a job interview. When he gets back, he tells her how he’s going to need… ‘more ties!’ and they both hop about joyously like utter dicks.

At first I thought this advert was stupid. Then I found it fantastically annoying. Then, somehow, it’s laughable quality gave it laugh-worthy quality and I ended up enjoying it. If I ever get bothered about my grey hair, one brand name is now very familiar to me.

It can take a lot to lodge something in a person’s brain. I’m not doing about a pick-axe or a spear here, I’m talking about advertising.

Different ads ‘bed in’ at different speeds. Generally, a person will need to see an advert a number of times for it to really have much of an impact. But how much is too much?

Because some advertising campaigns are highly targeted, you can find that you see the same ads again and again and again if you watch certain programmes regularly. When these ads become overfamiliar, they merely become irritating and this is the feeling your target audience ends up with.

Marketing isn’t just about raising awareness about your product. It’s about presenting it in the right way to the right people.

When I was in India recently, I spotted a worrying trend in the TV advertising there. As well as having ad breaks and various companies sponsoring each programme (often six or seven sponsors for one show) they also have these invasive ads that run during the thing that you’re watching.

The way it works is the main picture is shrunk slightly – like a window on the computer – and ads are presented along the bottom and side of the screen while the programme continues. I experience intense irritation whenever these ads are run. Is that the feeling you want associated with your brand?