More and more, brands are moving away from the traditional avenues of communicating with potential customers and more toward unorthodox, less-tested methods of communication.

At VI, we’ve been reading The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. The science behind how habits form and neurologically what takes place in your brain is fascinating. This has real implications for understanding (and persuading) consumer behavior.

Congratulations on your new promotion as the marketing manager. Time for your first assignment: identifying a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool for the bank. It’s a big first task, so we wanted to provide a few hints for you to become a CRM pro.

Not all audiences want to be sold to, and not all clients have a budget large enough to reach everyone. In these instances, adding an influencer marketing campaign can be a great way to solve these problems.

At VI, we are fanatical about story. We have become students of it, we study it and we apply it. We’re fond of telling our clients that “everyone has a story." And in reality, it’s probably an understatement.

Fake news has been around forever. We know this because Mark Twain was talking about fake news when he said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

From Aristotle to Zuckerberg, thousands of speakers for thousands of years have used speaking engagements as a key marketing tool to inform, persuade or entertain their audiences.

I’ve been involved in a lot of strategic planning sessions lately, and we inevitably discuss brand vision at some point in time. That is, what does the organization want the brand to ultimately be? Something lofty, even noble. As we discuss this, some clients will talk about a vision that is well articulated and congruent with how they are currently operating. Others want their brand to be something that is far different than what it is today (fair enough) and they operate in a manner that isn’t going to get them there (impossible).

If you’re looking for a quick fix when it comes to ranking on the first page of Google search results, this article is not for you. After all, appearing within the top 10 search engine results takes time and patience, and the harsh truth is there’s no exact formula for making your way to the top.

Do you encourage customer feedback? Do you make it easy by ensuring you have a clear system in place that allows your customers to effortlessly leave comments? Let’s hope the answer to both of these questions is a resounding "yes."

The marketing industry has certainly seen the benefits of content marketing — higher consumer engagement, lower costs, more leads. But while many marketers scramble to create content in an attempt to shout through the noise of a saturated digital space, even fewer have put in the time and research to first craft a an effective strategy.

Our media landscape is becoming more fragmented by the day. Audiences are consuming media (especially video content) across multiple platforms, often at the same time. These changing media habits really underline the question of how can we measure TV and digital video viewing, and then compare it on an apples-to-apples level?