Reaching Niche Audiences: Pushing the Message - part 3/3 part series

by Mary Lou Roberts
Marketers need to achieve significant reach among desirable niche audiences to acquire new customers. That’s how I’m loosely using the term “push”– to get the message out and to use the responses for traditional CRM or community-building. Advertising networks are available for that purpose, and today verticals have taken center stage.
There is [...]

When Anything Might Offend Someone

by Andrea Learned
Have you ever noticed, how, if you try, almost any marketing campaign can be viewed as sexist or offensive to one person or the other? For example, a year or so back, The Gap ran this ad [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1BppoosV3U[/youtube] with Lenny Kravitz playing guitar and singing while Sarah Jessica Parker danced in tight [...]

What Men Want - Their Brands Served Up With A Good Laugh

by Carol Davies
Super Bowl 2008 presents one of the greatest extravaganzas for marketing to men. Outrageous, over-the-top, in-your-face-hilarious (not to mention expensive), Super Bowl advertising may not be your everyday approach for speaking to today’s male, but it does prompt an obvious question - why does humor sell to men?

Strategizing for Engagement in Social Media

by Dr. Mary Lou Roberts
The siren song of social media is that it’s really easy to do. An individual or a company can set up a MySpace or Facebook page, establish a presence in Second Life, or start a blog, to name only a few of the possibilities. The danger lies in entering the world [...]

Inside Holiday Retail Performance- No Surprises in Light of the American Mood

by Faith Popcorn
We’re hard-pressed to see how anyone was surprised by the worst holiday retail season in five years. There are very real, palpable economic woes that would have the most eager consumers sitting on their wallets. Then there is the overall mood -the war drags on, we aren’t excited by any of the [...]

Of Polar Winds and Gender Polarization

by Andrea Learned
As I sit and type this post in Burlington, Vermont, the outside temperature is 10 degrees Fahrenheit with a windchill that makes it feel like 3 - so perhaps my mind is on “polarization” as in the North Pole kind. But, what I am actually pondering these days is “polarization” [...]

The Global Power of the Purse

by Fara Warner
American women have shown the world—especially the world of business—the power of our purses. We lead the world as the No. 1 consumers for everything from lattes at our local coffee bar to the products of global powerhouses such as Nike and Procter & Gamble.
We’ve also shown the rest of the world what [...]

Good Long-weekend Reads

To those of our readers who read my posts - I try to sneak some posts in between our fabulous writers - you know I am big on practical “how-to-lists”, “top-10 lists” and just interesting tid-bits of information - as I believe these sound-bites resonate with busy marketing professionals for their day-to-day work. In [...]

Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve sees 2008 as a “transitional year”, as a turbulent global society seeks a new “core focus.”

by Faith Popcorn
Our world continues to be rife with unrest, uncertainty and angst since we were turned upside down with the events of 9/11 and the cascade of events which can be traced to direct bi-products of that world changing event. With the War in Iraq, new global tensions among nations, and a heightened [...]

Reaching Niche Audiences: Pulling the Content - part II of a three-part series

by Dr. Mary Lou Roberts
The numbers I quoted in part 1 of this series paint a fascinating picture of young mothers connected to one another by technology and common interests. We ended on the question, “How do marketers reach them?”
Reaching targeted audiences, on and off the web, becomes a more significant issue every day. Audiences [...]