Interview with Jane Genova: THE NEW YORK TIMES puts the question out there: Can GM make it back?  I would reframe the issue as: What kinds of odds are the smart-money folks giving to a GM reset? To answer this question, I caught up with Julie Roehm who has down cold the auto industry. Roehm is a marketing guru known for creativity and the know-how/courage to implement ideas.  She was able to do just that in the car world of Detroit, both at Ford and Chrysler.  Among her homeruns was making the Ford Focus cool.  Currently, she travels the globe doing marketing for a range of industries. Here...

Today Ad Age posted an article based on an interview with Bob Lutz. When I read the comments, it was clear the 99% of the respondents were very critical of the interview. My take is that Bob understands that a wholesale shift has to be made. He understands obviously that he is retiring later this year and so is likely to be thinking about setting tone and leadership that will outlast his tenure. Given all that I know of Mr. Lutz he has every intention of shaking it up and has the attitude and experience to make good on that promise. My personal wish for him would be to start with thinking (and...

Much thought and deliberation is occurring over when, how and if big brands should employ social media.  While Twittering today, I found ab interesting tweet regarding a new study being released by Razorfish on this topic.  I copied and pasted some of what I thought were the best insights below.  As an aside, I will be speaking on this topic this Wednesday on Fox Business News…thoughts welcome! The folks at Razorfish just released a report called “Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report” that entrepreneurs and marketers need to read. It examines how social media influences...

Marketing powerhouse Julie Roehm arrived at Bentonville, Arkansas with the 21st century equivalent of the counterculture flowers-in-her-hair.  She was hired by Wal-Mart to make it more competitive against emerging usptarts like Target. Roehm was different, at least for Bentonville and Wal-Mart.  She had to be to turn around its prosaic branding.  It was an outsized Lee Iacocca who turned around the staid Chrysler in the early 1980s.  It is the idiosyncratic Nassim Taleb who’s turning around business assumptions [See "The Black Swan."] But unlike Iacocca and Taleb, she was different and...