Recently Fast Company launched a new feature on their site called Brand Innovator Spotlight.  Written by Brandon Gutman of FOCi Group, the feature is an interview with Brand Marketers who are pushing marketing innovation in their businesses.  In their first two features, they put the spotlight on industry colleagues of mine: Aaaron Magness, head of Brand Marketing at Zappos and Bert DuMars is VP E-Business & Interactive Marketing for Newell Rubbermaid.

I particularly love this excerpt from the interview with Bert where he talked about how they are using Social Media to gain a better understanding on the troubles consumers are facing:

We partnered with BazaarVoice to enable consumer generated product reviews on the Rubbermaid.com brand Web site.  This allows us to get real-time feedback from consumers on what they like and do not like about our products.  It also helps identify issues that we can respond to or fix.  When we launched our Produce Saver food storage product the first 7 reviews came back as two 5-Star and five 1-Star reviews.  That is quite a difference but good to know.  We contacted the five 1-Star reviewers and found out they were not following the instructions on how to use the product.  We immediately put additional instruction information on the product page and wrote a blog post on how to use Produce Saver for best results.  You can see the results of this effort as we moved from 71% of the first reviewers not recommending the product to 92% of 129 reviewers currently recommending product.

If you are looking to hear from the best leaders in the Brand Marketing space, these Brand Innovator Spotlights are a must add to your RSS reader.