Review of Business POV

Based in Chicago, Business POV’s principals Mark Scheffler (editor and producer) and Peter Scheffler (development and financial management) set out in fall 2006 to create a free resource to discuss successful and unsuccessful industry models, with a focus on local business strategies.

With a team of producers, editors, videographers, and business developers behind them, their combined work for Chicago’s financial magazines and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange gave them the leverage they needed to make their website work.

This is one of the broadest business journalism vlogs that I’ve seen yet. Spanning advertising, product development, packaging, marketing, and even consumer reports, this website covers everything in terminology that anyone can understand, but with an emphasis on industry’s finer details, for the same crowd who reads the Wall Street Journal’s editorials.

The edited, professionally shot videos are short (2 to 7 minutes), fresh daily, and are compiled into two categories with various subsections. The Top Stories category includes Perspective (industry analyses), Product (demonstrations and reviews), Profile (bios of industry developers), and Process (creative and technical development). The Local Knowledge category is divided into Ask the Expert and a random assortment of other interesting advice.

Even someone with no business sense at all can find something interesting here, whether it’s the video on the marketing strategy behind the CIA’s college recruitment campaign or the business plan behind the McCormick Employee Motivation Show.

The advantage here is the focus on insider commentary, found in full force with the video where a designer from Webb Scarlett deVlam explains the detailed process behind creating packaging for Lifestyles Brand Condoms’ new sexual lubricant Excite. It’s almost incredible how much pre-planning goes into the visual design for such a thing. This discussion of target consumer stereotypes, illustrations of situations where the product would be ideally used, “visualizations of the brand essence,” consumer trees, circuitous “item aspirations,” and demographic color palettes is a fascinating look behind the curtain of marketing and product design.