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As retailers strive to touch consumers at every step of the purchase cycle, retail marketing has evolved to become a mosaic of mass-media branding, tactics for driving store traffic, in-store experience, and loyalty programs. It's a lot to manage, but this checklist should help. more

Computers are the campfires of today, around which we are all gathered. If you have a good story to tell there, people will listen. Here is a practical guide to creating brand-driven Web entertainment that marketers can use in their content-development efforts. The key is to have fun, experiment, and create ... more

Thanks to technology, you've got a big file of data available for your review and analysis. But what to do with all those numbers? How do you change them into English? How do you help them tell you a story about an advertising campaign? more

Traditional TV tends to deliver measurable advertising results only for true mass-market products—in part because you need about $15 million to begin even the smallest mainstream TV campaign. Cable TV, on the other hand, is a powerfully viable alternative, delivering much higher ROI on much lower budgets in a national campaign. ... more

Guerrilla Marketing is often defined as an unconventional way of performing promotional activities on a very low budget. While this is accurate, it's not quite right. The great guerrillas like Che or Mao had something more going for them than being "unconventional and cheap." Their battles became legend because they ... more

If you want to learn how to develop new revenue generating customer relationships, check out the strategic Nike+ iPod alliance. Would a similar model work for you? more

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Google recently launched Google Trends, a tool that allows you to view keyword search trends by year and month. You can also view trends by news mentions and by region/country of searchers performing searches. Here are some real-world ways marketers can use the data in this truly useful tool to help ... more

The month-long 2006 World Cup Soccer tournament will begin on June 9, and already commercials have been launched referencing the event. The heavy hitters behind those ads include 15 global brands, such as McDonalds, Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Nike, and Adidas. The US focuses on advertising globally since the World Cup typically evokes ... more

A new Internet gold rush has been taking hold with the emergence of social networking, blogging, podcasting, and other Web 2.0 experiments. Media companies and Internet giants have reacted promptly by acquiring many of the new players to take advantage of these new advertising vehicles and evolve their endangered models. Yet ... more

With click-to-call, it's now possible to bridge the gap between the online and phone channels, and track the effectiveness of both. more

The more ads look and sound the same, the more we simply let them fade into our subconscious. They become little more than background noise. What's an advertiser to do? more

Relationships. Trust. Delivery of superb value. These are core ingredients of a successful service firm. Talk to 100 service firm marketers and leaders, and they'll all tell you (and most of them believe it) that their firm is at the top of their industry in each of these categories. Why, then, ... more

At a time when America is still feeling the sting of a prominent columnist being paid handsomely by a third-party for writing favorable opinion pieces; the nation's most respected newspaper publishing fabricated stories; and television stations running government-supplied and funded video news releases to report stories about the war, more ... more

Last week, we ended the first part of this two-part series with a discussion of the perceived entry barriers to marketing to Hispanics. Now, we take a brief look at the tactics that marketers use to reach the Hispanic market, and discuss in depth Search Engine Marketing as an optimal ... more

The US Hispanic population, with its growing purchasing power and impressive growth in media usage, has companies scrambling for ideas and ways to effectively target this barely tapped market. In this new report from MarketingProfs is solid and hard-to-find data on what organizations are doing effectively to target this market, ... more

Nothing gets the adrenalin pumping quite like an AdWords campaign that delivers a strong ROI. Success brings a big grin on your face when you realize you can invest more in the campaign, expand the base of keywords, and make even more money. The more you spend, the more you ... more

Advertising and marketing has changed. What could possibly be the cause of so many beleaguered established players and fortunate newer ones? more

Shopping portals, comparison-shopping sites, and search engines allow merchants to promote increasingly detailed merchandising offers with the goal of cost-effectively increasing brand visibility, acquiring new customers, and driving incremental revenues. But how does an online retail merchant ensure that third-party shopping destinations and other referral-based merchandising channels contribute to the bottom ... more

Every marketer has by now heard the terms viral, buzz and word of mouth. Some will even have noted terms such as brand advocacy, advergames, blog marketing, influencer panels and consumer empowerment seeping into the industry's vocabulary. Collectively, the latest shift in thinking in the world of marketing has been termed ... more

As a relatively new player in the increasingly competitive comparison-shopping and online retail arena, pricefish.com needed a comprehensive and creative marketing campaign and strategy to re-launch the pricefish.com brand and generate consumer awareness for the site, among other things. Here's how they did it. Get the full story. more

Freestyle may describe a particular type of competition in this year's Winter Olympics, but it more aptly defines the attitudes, mindset and personalities of the games' most controversial and media-savvy athletes. Is their irreverence just a product of the Echo-Boom Generation, or is it something more? Could it possibly be ... more

Even with January behind us, a brand manager is still full of the promise of the New Year. Sure, things didn't go perfectly during 2005. But it's worth taking note of those things you'll solemnly swear you'll never do again. more

With Google AdWords, it is now possible to target prospects at the very moment they are thinking about buying your products or services. Here's how to maximize your success with Google AdWords. With proper preparation and execution, starting Google AdWords can be like planting a money tree that will provide ... more