marketing

Use this calculator to determine the marketing ROI (Return on Investment) for any direct mail or e-mail campaign.

The mistakes they have identified and how to aovid them.

I am a chemical engineer and have been writing copy designed to sell products and services to engineers for 10 years. Here's what I know about appealing to this special audience:

A whole range of ideas relating to the American University Library

MediaPost has two stories today that start to answer a larger question about how the Internet will fare in a weakening economy. For some time people have been speculating that if the economy hits a meaningful downturn or heads into recession, what will happen to the Internet ad spend?

The Economist has identified influential US bloggers and leaks tips and stories to them, in order to create online buzz before the articles are published in the Economist.

Those rapid-fire "HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead" spots are arguably among the worst commercials ever from a creative standpoint. They're annoying, repetitive, obnoxious -- and effective. Another view about so-called "interruption" marketing!

But there is another factor at play - the product (sold in UK as 4 Head) works wonderfully well. I never travel without it.

Positioning is something (perception) that happens in the minds of the target market. It is the aggregate perception the market has of a particular company, product or service in relation to their perceptions of the competitors in the same category.

Seth Godin remembers learning new words and phrases by the barrelful in business school. As a business-book writer, he's exposed to them all the time. Many of them are actually quite useful, because they give you precise words to describe things that would be difficult to communicate otherwise. For example, telling someone that a particular hedge fund is "highly leveraged" is a lot easier than saying, "They've borrowed a lot of money in order to speculate and multiply their positive returns using other people's money." On the other hand, ....

Australia has just introduced it's "do not call" register and the sigh of relief around Australian dining tables is audible.

This article gives some usage sttistics for some types oif business user. =They are high at first glance - but then you remember the volume of input material they need to pick from. Also, the upbeat story comes from a private 'social network like) application - i.e. a closed system. It also notes the need to protect the data.

'I admit it; I'm cynical when it comes to advertising and marketing. I believe that the sole purpose of advertising is to convince me to part with my well-earned and limited supply of money and persuade me that I want things that I don't. Who asked marketers to join readers online?

Shopping online requires trust between buyer and seller: often, each relies on the other's reputation. Today, a Waltham, MA, startup called TrustPlus is releasing a new product that collects information about online reputations so that people can better manage their own, and investigate others'.