Marketing is changing completely. Not only in terms of the way that traditional practices are diminishing, but in the way that people who do marketing think. For the majority of marketing history, practitioners have applied long-term, waterfall strategies to brands, relying upon static artifacts like fiscal reports and ambiguous, annual product planning to theoretically increase revenue. Such reasoning was (and in many cases, still is) due to the idea that marketers have all of the answers, so much so that they can predict the future behaviors of their customers.  This mindset looks something like: “If we implement X strategy, we will get X number of new Facebook fans, X number of our product will be sold, and we will increase X amount of revenue from last year, making the campaign successful.” However, the various values of “X” become a lot less predictable as the balance of power moves further from the marketer and closer to the user.

Transparent practices are everything to PCR. Our client relationships, work environment, and overall model of business is based upon honesty and integrity. As marketing continues to progress toward user experience design and analysis, we believe it is vital to fuel the discussion on transparency and help organizations realize the importance of openness with their customers, employees, and strategies. This featured series highlights the organizations that are getting it right and setting themselves apart as upstanding examples of responsiveness and honesty.

This is a guest post by Ivan Serrano. To check out more of his inforgraphics and marketing content, click here. 

With big fish like Facebook and Twitter dominating the social media sphere, it’s hard for new social media sites to make a splash. While a lot of sites have failed to stick around, some prove themselves to be just as impactful as the big ones. Case and point, Pinterest.

This is a guest post my Ivan Serrano. To check out more of his inforgraphics and marketing content, click here. 

Oh Google. It’s in the vocabulary of nearly every one from small children to and tech-savvy professionals. When the company was founded in 1995 by Stanford graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin, they simply liked the idea of a ‘googol,’ a mathematical term describing the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The googol soon became symbolic of what Google could, or would become: a company of infinite possibilities. By 1999 the company outgrew their garage and moved into a small apartment space in Palo Alto. They had eight employees.