30 Ways to Show Your Customers They’re Always Right

When you’re a start-up with few employees and few customers, it’s easy to stay on top of what customers want and what they’re getting. But as you add more customers and employees, you add links to the customerservice chain. That creates the potential for growth and the potential for poor service along the way. That’s why [...]

How to Enlist a Global Work Force of Freelancers

Small businesses increasingly are tapping a new talent pool: the world.  A new generation of online service marketplaces is giving small companies more opportunities than ever to find specialized expertise and affordable labor. Main Street businesses can shop a virtual international bazaar of freelancers to recruit computer programmers in Russia, graphic designers in San Francisco [...]

What Happens If You Cut Media Spending?

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — In the short term, marketers can get away with cutting media spending without much real harm. But that term is as short as a quarter, and the harm, once it begins, can last long after the media switch gets turned back on.
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If Retail Shelves Seem Bare, That’s Because They Are

Analysts say that supermarkets, drugstores and discount retailers, who have been expanding the amount of products they carry for years, will be trimming the assortment of products in their stores by at least 15%, Ilan Brat, Ellen Byron and Ann Zimmerman report. Brands, sizes, colors, flavors, fragrances and prices are all under scrutiny.
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10 Ways Shopper Marketing Can Improve Sales in a Tough Economy

Shopper marketing has only recently permeated the marketing mainstream. Its proponents argue that it is an important move away from past adversarial trade marketing and sales promotion tactics to a more strategic discipline that has a key role to play in an integrated approach.
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Music: The Universal Language

You don’t have to be from Mexico or even understand Spanish to appreciate this commercial.
(see it now)

Big Boys Cutting Back Variety

(Wall Street Journal) Big retailers are expected to cut the assortment of products in stores by at least 15% in the next year or so. The drive to simplify is a big shift in the trillion-dollar consumer-products sector.
(see the video)

What Ad Agencies Can Learn From Hookers and Virgins

(Ad Age) A few weeks ago, this tweet crossed my path: “agency advising on digital branding that isn’t active in the digital space is like a virgin showing a hooker the ropes.”
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Marketers Express Digital Frustration

More than two-thirds (67%) of global marketing executives say they already are running digital cross-channel ad campaigns, but only 12% are integrating their cross-channel performance data – across TV, outdoor, mobile, print and online – when they plan, execute and measure these campaigns, according to a survey of worldwide marketing executives by Eyeblaster and TNS.
(read [...]

5 Employee Motivation Myths

Business owners need to ensure that their employees are productive and eager to do the best job possible–this is especially true during today’s challenging economic times. Yet every industry and every organization has people who simply do not produce work in the quality that they are capable of providing. That can create costly problems for a [...]