Julie Anixter is the strategic director of laga/degrippes-gobe, one of the world's leading brand design and innovation firms. She has developed products with Roger Schank, Seth Godin and Tom Peters, and helped organizations use design and innovation to grow their brands. She is a contributing author of Beyond Branding and the best-selling The Big Moo. She is also the co-founder of Remarkabalize.com.
Julie took time out of her busy schedule to have a conversation with us, a conversation that included the terms “choiceful,” “borg-ish” and “bully pulpit,” spoke to the point of chocolate Swoops and, in which, without prompting, the interviewee talks about scratching itches:
1) What is the thing you consistently see brands getting wrong these days?
Brands are scared. They don’t take risks. They are often stuck – for lots of seemingly good business reasons – in thinking that is decades old. Yes it’s a confusing time, but in confusing times, the brave prevail. There is a thinking-doing gap a mile wide and deep. Lots of great trend watching and debate on the sidelines… fewer gutsy CEO’s and CMO’s shaking it up.
Nedra Kline Weinreich is the president and founder of Weinreich Communications and is one of the foremost experts in social marketing.
A frequent speaker, Nedra teaches social marketing at UCLA's School of Public Health and was adjunct faculty at Georgetown University. She is the author of Hands-On Social Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide and a prominent blogger on social marketing issues at the Spare Change blog.
Ok, so, real simple for those of us who went to public school, what is social marketing?Hey, I went to public school too, so it can't be too hard to understand. Basically, it's using a marketing approach to promoting health and social issues. In social marketing, our bottom line is not profits, but behavior change. So, when organizations like nonprofits or public agencies want to bring about health or social change, they are turning more and more to the same kinds of methods used by companies like Apple or Nike. The field of social marketing has been around since the 1970s, but it's only recently that awareness and use of it has trickled down to the community level.
Some people have recently starting lumping together things like social media marketing or social network marketing under the term social marketing. It's becoming awfully confusing because now when I talk about social marketing for the first time with a new person, I have to clarify to make sure we are both using the same definition. I often feel alone on my semantic crusade.
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. She is also the co-founder of 
Nedra Kline Weinreich is the president and founder of Weinreich Communications and is one of the foremost experts in social marketing.
