Lovemark, Tipping Point, Crowdsourcing: AdAge Best Ideas of the Decade

You can read the the full list of ten AdAge Best Ideas of the Decade at AdAge. I’ve selected and excerpted three of the ten ideas that interested me most. And I’ve reordered them to my taste as well. :) (emphasis and links added)

LOVEMARKS
Not everyone in Adland has shown love for Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts‘ belief that Lovemarks is the way forward for brand marketing. Strip away the cheesy language, though, and his philosophy — aiming to create emotional connections between consumers and brands that become lasting relationships — is tough to quarrel with. And, compared to most agency positioning, like say TBWA vet Jean Marie Dru’s Disruption, Lovemarks is a simple, more accessible technique to grasp. For all the butt of jokes Lovemarks has been, it’s also proved a successful new-business tool for Saatchi that attracted a swath of marketers during this decade, from packaged goods accounts to fast feeders like Wendy’s. Most famously, Lovemarks was what attracted JCPenney to hand its $430 million ad account to Saatchi after Mr. Roberts told CMO Mike Boylson that Penney’s needed to be a Lovemark with Middle America.

TIPPING POINT
In his 2000 book, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell [K: his blog is very readable] introduced the language of connectors and mavens, the 80/20 rule and sticky ideas in an attempt to understand how ideas spread through cultures. In the early part of the decade, this terminology was relied upon to explain how trends caught on. Although it’s been largely supplanted by the language of virality, Gladwell’s thinking still has resonance. Peer-to-peer pass-along has become the single most important factor in considering how ideas — marketing or otherwise — get distributed in a marketing world marked by extreme clutter. […]

CROWDSOURCING
[…] “crowdsourcing” — thought to have been coined in 2006 by Wired Magazine — has gone from one-off contests staged to give brands a jolt of PR buzz to mass collaboration efforts that allow consumers to affect the look and feel of brands in meaningful ways. The phenomenon caught fire in 2000, with smaller companies such as Jones Soda using its website to poll its young customers about new drink flavors, and it wasn’t long before the big guys caught on. [K: There is a long list of technical uses not explored here but should be noted.] Frito Lay’s Doritos brand has made an annual tradition out of its consumer-generated Super Bowl spots, while package-goods giant Unilever actually dumped its agency, Lowe, London, so it could crowdsource campaigns.