Jeff Shearer

I was reading an article yesterday morning in the Seattle Times about the recently announced search engine partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo. The writers made the claim that to win in the search world, continuous innovation is the name of the game. I agree with this statement. Google wouldn’t have the market share they have [...]

Social Media is often tough to describe. Even as a professional in the field, it is hard to find an all-encompassing description that isn’t endlessly long. I like to direct people to the wikipedia definition of social media, because it itself is a form of social media, and who better to describe the phenomenon than [...]

As a young, recently graduated marketing professional, I get a lot of questions about twitter. What it is, what its for, what all the bustle is about. Considering the infinite number of ways that people use Twitter, I thought I would outline how and why I use twitter, to give you an idea of how [...]

The Nintendo Wii is a popular topic in my marketing classes. Nintendo looked at the videogame console industry, saw its competitors Sony and Microsoft battling over performance and graphics, and rather than joining the fray sought to take a different path altogether. They subsequently targeted non-consumption: casual gamers, older individuals and families while Sony and [...]

One of my classes this quarter is Sustainable Marketing, a fascinating course that explores ecological design, corporate social responsibility, and personal “green” practices. While the class is primarily composed of marketing majors, the instructor opened the course to industrial design majors as well. One of them is in my group, and he has added his [...]

Yesterday I made the journey down to Seattle for the monthly American Marketing Association (Puget Sound chapter) luncheon. The topic of this month’s event was “Mutually Beneficial Marketing: Why businesses and brands need a good purpose”, and the keynote speaker was Caroline Dettman, the managing director and executive vice presidentt of the Chicago Consumer Brands [...]

What does your logo convey to the consumer? Is its representative of something bigger? Is this apparent to the consumer, or simply to the insider?  Your brand is your promise to the consumer, and your  logo is a signal of this. If consumers don’t notice, what is the point of over-complicating a logo with, for [...]