Probably the best thing about working at MarketPlace is that most of my passions converge in my office. I get to design websites, study analytics, stay current on social media and video marketing technology, to name a few. When I leave the office, I take those passions with me and head home, where I get… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Category: Uncategorized
Be Held: The Art of Packaging
I didn’t have the type of mother who said things like, “Well, you’re a sight to behold,” but if I did, she would have said that to me just about every day during my middle school years. I regret many of the outfits I wore in the mid- to late-eighties, but not because I dressed… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Instagram: Capturing Perception
The moment is fleeting. You’d love for time to stop, but it doesn’t. You want the experience to linger, but you can’t hold it. You can, however, click it. And it takes only an instant. How many of your friends and acquaintances use a still camera to record their lives? Pretty much everyone, no doubt.… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Talk Like There’s No Innovation: B2B Differentiation
I klong weekly. You probably do, too. “Klong” means “a sudden rush of crud to the heart” caused by the realization that you’d said, done, or believed something wrong for a long time. For example, I realized one day years back that I’d been saying and writing the phrase “for all intensive purposes” for at… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Food Marketing Technology and Your Customer’s Customer
From day one, MarketPlace has championed an undisputed fact of food marketing: a successful product sells into the unique desires and ever-changing tastes of the end-consumer. If droves of consumers start tweeting about their love for earthworm flavor or gym-sock aroma, food and beverage R&D teams will be working hard to capture the essence of… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Marketing the Impossible
We love challenges, whether they’re related to marketing strategy, advertising, brand building, or eating X number of Y in Z minutes. So we especially love it when we partner with a client who enjoys challenges as much as we do. Solazyme Roquette Nutritionals, a new client, is doing amazing things in the food, beverage, and… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Good Design, Like Good People, Inspires Generosity
So, yeah, baby Dwayne is pretty darn cute. We love seeing him this way: happy, secure, and with a great opportunity to beat the systemic forces of homelessness among women and children in St. Louis. We love that Gateway180 entrusts us with the weighty work of helping to ensure that people know about, and respond… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Faithful Marketing (or How to Create a Church Website)
How do you brand a body of people? How do you market a symbol? How do you design a great user experience for a constantly changing demographic group? Those are but a few of the many, many worldview-heavy challenges we faced as we created a website for Memorial Presbyterian Church (PCA) in St. Louis. We… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
To Natural Products Expo West and Back
There are probably only two places where you can find a DJ spinning tunes for a baby food brand, a grown man dressed as the Lorax, and a yogurt container the size of a condo. The first is New York’s hottest nightclub, where I’ve never been, and the second, from which I just returned, is… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
A Loose-Leaf Look for a New Tea Market
We recently began working with Martin Bauer Inc, an integrated division of the Martin Bauer Group, a German-based supplier of herbal and fruit infusions, teas, and tea extracts. Their customers include companies from the tea, beverage, and pharmaceutical industries, and we’re working with them on marketing tea ingredients to help them break into the US… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Marketing at the Center of Innovation
We’re very excited to be working with Roquette, a world leader in the ingredients industry offering a wide range of products and solutions in human nutrition, pharmacy-cosmetology, paper/board, chemistry-bioindustry, and animal nutrition. Experts in polyols and the leading European producer of maltodextrins, pyrogen-free raw materials, and cationic starches, Roquette has factories in Europe, America, and… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Translating Hope, Designing Love: G180 and MarketPlace
It has long been a tradition of MarketPlace to partner with organizations that give back to the community. One of our favorites is Gateway 180.Gateway180: Homelessness Reversed, located in downtown St. Louis, is a resource for women and children experiencing the unimaginable burden of homelessness. They provide a safe and nurturing emergency shelter along with services… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Putting on our Dairy Shoes
“Bring rubber boots”—that was my only advice for Elliott, our multimedia producer, the day before we visited a dairy farm for a video we’re producing. Elliott didn’t listen. Poor Elliott’s shoes. Rough start. But the cows sure were cute. Right, Elliott? We started with an up-close and personal tour of the farm as we snapped… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Unwrapping Food
When we’re not marketing food, we’re discussing, praising, preparing, or consuming it. Does this qualify us to discuss the holidays? You bet your fruitcake. No matter who, where, or how you are, your holiday memories involve food. The holidays don’t exist because of food, but they probably wouldn’t exist without it. I could recommend trying… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
The Technology of Trust: Building Brand Equity on Social Media
Typically, I pay more notice to my VHS collection of MacGyver episodes than to political conventions, but in 2004, even I cared about politics, as a handful of bloggers was issued press credentials for the Democratic and Republican conventions. This small act of validation signaled a large-scale shift in the way that Americans consume media.… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>