Mixed Signals: Orange Juice Is Good But Not Omniscient

Mixed Signals is Erin Straza’s musing about marketing miscellany in advertising, branding, and messaging. Some days are so full of trouble and mishap, they leave us breathless and downcast in its wake. We wish we had gotten a hint of what was ahead so we could have been prepared for the onslaught. A campaign for [...]

Mixed Signals: War Child PSA Turns Bullets into Crayons

Communication is plentiful today. Messages arrive via other people, e-mail, radio, TV, mobile devices, mail, telephone, and the Web. The sound is deafening. Message overload is the norm. Marketing specialists look for creative ways to slice through the cacophony, to capture our interest long enough with a message riveting enough to make an impression. It [...]

Mixed Signals: Staged Brand Experiences or Building Blocks for Belonging?

You remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs—it prescribes the building blocks individuals need to achieve something dubbed self actualization. In order to work toward the pinnacle, our physiological, personal safety, love and belonging, and self esteem needs must be met, respectively. Then we arrive at some idealistic state of personhood, which no one has ever experienced [...]

Mixed Signals: The Price is Right! Right?

Marketers obviously know how to influence me. But I also admit that my internal spending matrix was constructed in U.S. society, heavily influenced by the spending values of our culture.

Mixed Signals: You Are Your Brand

When I am honest and forthright about who I am—my beliefs, my skills, my standards—then people know me and what I stand for.

Mixed Signals: Do Products Deliver the Simple Life We Crave?

“The real concern is that we begin to think that living a streamlined, simple life is as easy as buying a product.”

Mixed Signals: Your Life as a PR Campaign

“Instead of living life for the joy of living it, we set up moments that we can broadcast, making life more like a production to execute to an audience rather than a life to live to the full.”

Mixed Signals: How to Make a Proper Apology

“Learning to make a proper apology is one of those indispensable life skills that we all need but few of us were trained to deliver appropriately.”

Mixed Signals: Giving Grace to the Airline Industry

“No one is perfect. Not even the airline industry.”

Mixed Signals: T-Mobile's Good Girl Goes Edgy but Do Customers Care?

“The question is if edgy-and-fast is the key decision factor customers consult when selecting mobile companies.”