Marketers Serve Super-Cheap Thanksgiving Fare

This Thanksgiving, it looks like many consumers will come to the table grateful for food bargains, as marketers turn the spotlight on cheap eats.
It’s noticeable at all food stores, even those targeting high-end shoppers: Whole Foods Market is trumpeting 10 great wines for the holiday, all at $15 or less.
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2010 to Come in Plain and Fancy Versions

IN less than two months, a new year will arrive, along with a new decade. Each year in the current decade has been spoken the long way, as in “two thousand nine,” rather than the short way, as in “twenty oh nine” (or even “twenty ought nine”).
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Small business tips: what is roi in advertising?

There are so many ways to advertise. How do you pick one? One way is to consider the advertising return on investment or ROI. ROI is a measure of the effectiveness of your advertising. How much you made compared to how much you spent or invested. While the ROI is usually talked about qualitatively rather than quantitatively, [...]

Kraft Pushes Recipes as a Marketing Tool

Kraft Foods continues to push its plan to increase the number of recipes available to consumers that incorporate Velveeta cheese.
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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 [...]

Malls stage events to make play for people’s shopping dollars

(Chicago Tribune) Impulse shopping has fallen by the wayside with the recession, and shopping center owners are trying to bring it back. With cost-conscious consumers hesitant to shop for fun, malls are turning to a time-tested strategy of staging events that have little to do with shopping in hopes that once people come through the [...]

Madvertising! (10 ad tricks in Tokyo train station)

Not every day, but every once in a while, I find myself in the train on my way to work staring at a boring poster and asking myself how manypeople possibly already stared at that same poster the same day. Everyone heard about over-packed trains in Tokyo, but with train stations such as Shinjuku being the [...]

Papa John’s Founder Makes Pizza Deliveries

The founder of Papa John’s is making pizza deliveries to surprised customers in a replica of the ’72 Camaro he sold 25 years ago to fund his start-up pizza business.  What are you doing (think out-of-the-box) to promote your business this summer?
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Attorney advertising… “The 24 hour promise”

NEWTON, Mass., May 14 /PRNewswire/ — It is close to impossible to find anyone in New England who has not heard of the personal injury attorney, Jim Sokolove. Back in 1982, Attorney Sokolove was one of the very first lawyers to use television as a means of reaching out to potential clients. Direct Impact Group, [...]

How to spot trends you can capitalize on

Sometimes you see a business evolve and think, “I wish I’d thought of that.  Learn how to…
1. Read the signs
2. Influence the trends
3. Embrace new and reject stodgy
4. Anticipate change
5. Ask experts the right questions
6. Seek out visionaries and snub fakers
7. Separate the trends from fads
8. Use technology-for everything
9. Cash in on being ahead of [...]