Entries from BizBox Blog on Slate tagged with 'Marketing'
For Successful Marketing, First Hook Your Customers
There's a whole heap of good advice the New York Times provides here for those small businesses--and the article is geared toward small businesses--who are curious about getting in on text-message marketing. If that at all piques your interest,...
The Way We Market Now
Baby Boomer nostalgia. A huge presence on the Internet and Facebook. An inexpensive, non-luxury, classic product. A new iPhone app. "Other offbeat aspects," such as in-store acoustic concerts, that are, naturally, vaguely indie. Yes, Gap's new ad campaign, "Born to...
Something To Be 'Grateful' For
Anyone who has lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side (we have) know that the caricature of it as some upper-middle-class yuppie liberal paradise that we know so well from Nora Ephron movies is, well, not actually all that far from...
To Tweet or To Email?
The New York Times runs a valuable article about Twitter, arguing, "Small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them." Why "more useful"? "For many...
Growing During The Recession
Somehow we missed this when it ran over a month ago, but the New Yorker published a wonderful little paean to the virtues of continuing to grow--and continuing to spend what it takes to grow--in recessions. "Numerous studies have shown...
Creative Recessioning
This article on how marketers are beginning to use vacant storefronts--of which, of course, there are an unusually large number right now--as cheap and prominent space for advertising caught our eye. Partly because it's just a wonderful recession-era trend piece....
Be Small and Proud
It turns out that being "Made in America" is a marketing plus if you're a manufactured good, and moreover a marketing plus that only gains power during recessions, the New York Times reports. “In hard economic times, a slogan built...
Market To The Young...At Heart
If marketing is the art of identifying and then enticing the most enviable customers for your product, it is looking increasingly like for all sorts of products the most enviable customer are people born before some year whose third digit...
Recession Marketing
Two articles give two perspectives on what sells during down times. In brief: nostalgia and free food. The New York Times reports that in coming weeks Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, McDonald's, General Mills, and others will run ad campaigns featuring genuinely vintage...
Starbucks Is Your New InstaCoffee
One of the bigger pieces of business news this week is that Starbucks, which has struggled mightily over the past year as the collapsing economy had made people slightly less ready to buy $5 lattes every day, has thrown...
Advertise Like Apple
We've written before about the comparative merits of Microsoft's and Apple's specific ad campaigns (the above link, for example, concerns the ill-fated "Mojave Experiment"--remember that one?). Today, though, we're focusing not on the campaigns themselves but on how much...
A Spiffy New Website We Like
Yesterday, we brought news of GetListed, a (FREE) service that lets you know how your Google is, as the phrase goes. Given the recession, we feel as though we can't tell you about too many inexpensive, helpful services. Today's offering--which...
Be More Like Denny's (Yes, Denny's)
Denny's, the fast-food chain semi-famous for its "real breakfast," is for the first time becoming a Super Bowl advertiser, the New York Times reports. It's forking over quite a hefty amount--as much as $3 million--for the privilege of having...
"Desperation Marketing"
That's the New York Times's word in a recent article for what characterizes the retail era in which we find ourselves. Forget concerns about a severely under-average holiday season, in which the worry was not that no one would buy...
Obama the Marketer
It's been a week since Barack Obama pulled off his resounding victory. The postmortems have credited any number of factors: Obama's superior campaign; the massive warchest he amassed; the utterly debased status of the Republican brand; John McCain's selection...
Vice is Nice
Art reflected life in season 3 of The Sopranos, which was set in and aired during the (in retrospect, and in comparison to what we're facing now, brief and mild) recession that hit in 2000-01. Worried about his bottom...
Have You Heard About TOMS Shoes?
Because videos are fun and it's a Friday afternoon, we wish you a good weekend with this: MSNBC tells us a feel-good story of small business marketing. Check out TOMS here....
The Merits of Specializing
We were going to write about the Paulson plan and its help to community banks. But the plan appears up in the air now that the U.S. House of Represenatives narrowly rejected it. So, instead we're going to talk...
This Is What We Mean By Creative Marketing
From our corporate sister The Washington Post: Classic Sleep Products, a Jessup, Md.-based bedmaker, has offered to send--free of charge!--535 mattresses to Congress so lawmakers can work 'round-the-clock to "iron out" (their pun; not ours) the current financial crisis....
Purple Is The New Yahoo!
We have announced our skepticism of Yahoo!'s "Start Wearing Purple" campaign, chiefly on the grounds that not too many people know about the Yahoo-purple connection that exists, and apparently--allegedly--always has. We still are skeptical, by the way, but fairness...
Ya-hue
From TechCrunch comes news that Yahoo! has a new ad campaign called "Start Wearing Purple". It's all about...purple, the color of kings and queens, and, apparently, of Yahoo! too lo these many years. Not that you would know this...
Cultivating a Fan Base
Rieva Lesonsky of AllBusiness has a post up--written, heroically, while she was at Wrigley Field cheering on the National League Central-leading Cubs--on how to make "fans" of your small business. This is a crucial subject: enthusiastic customers will both...
The Real Secret To Apple's Success
Do check out Rohit Bhargava's post over at our Topic of the Week blog, here....
Why You Should Read BizBox
This post's title only fulfills some of the criteria that SuzeMuse lays out in a wonderful post on the art of shameless self-promotion. We've admitted self-promotion, and now we're even being explicit about that. But we haven't been subtle;...
And What's The Deal With Apple?
Not one month after Microsoft debuted "The Mojave Experiment," its unique (and apparently ill-fated?) ad campaign for its Vista operating system, comes news (via Gizmodo) of the Seattle tech giant's initiating a $300 million campaign for Windows more broadly...
A Pro-Vista Post
We weren't exactly kind to Microsoft and to its current latest operating system, Vista, when the software mega-giant unveiled its "Mojave Experiment" ad campaign a few weeks ago. So it is only fair that we tell you of Vista's...
In Hard Times, The Discounter Is King
The sentiment embodied in the headline should not come as too much of a surprise. Still, it's worth taking stock of this trend. The big retail winners last quarter, according to the Washington Post, were BJ's Wholesale Club, Fred's,...
Getting Customer Referrals
Referrals are the lifeblood of a small business. And though Jill Lublin is BizBox's resident expert on the matter--see her great recent post on the subject here, and her BizBooks conversation about her recent Get Noticed...Get Referrals here-- we...
Microsoft's Zune, the ABiP: Anything But iPod
We wrote two days ago about the benefits of counter-branding, in which you conceptually go in the opposite direction of your industry in order to snatch up customers who are in the minority (so Universal successfully opened the musical...
Brett Favre: The Brand
Sports fans can (and have!) spent hours and hours debating whether legendary quarterback Brett Favre was correct to return to play another season at the age of 39 after months of waffling and a long, successful career. (A long-time...
Counter-branding: Go Against the Grain and Grow
We recently came across an article that reminded us of Robert Bloom's post last week on our Topic of the Week blog. Bob pointed out just how tough times are, but argued that they could nonetheless provide an advantage...
Rebranding M&Ms
Sounds like a contradiction in terms, right? If anything were ever all about branding, it would be these candies, which after all are just little pieces of chocolate without those colorful, tasteless shells with the little white m's on...
Enough About Mojave; Is Vista Entrepreneur-Friendly?
After a week of writing about The Mojave Experiment, Microsoft's bizarre, unorthodox, probably unsuccessful ad campaign, we're done. Except to link to this article about it that appeared on our sister site Slate yesterday. There: done. But what about...
Licensing Your Brand, Licensing Other Brands
Here's a cute, fun video from MSNBC on the licensing expo: It is fascinating how the handbag maker, while fully standing behind the quality of his product, nonetheless knows that he needs a more marketable brand--and that's all slapping...
Yet More On Mojave
You know an Internet meme has made it when it makes its way into print; and you know it is fully crystallized when the New York Times deems it worthy of its august pages. Please welcome Microsoft's Mojave Experiment,...
Cashing in on the Campaign
Sen. Barack Obama is set to break all fundraising records, and even Sen. John McCain looks likely to hold his own in that department. More broadly, the 2008 election features the first-ever African-American candidate and the first campaign with...
More on Mojave
Earlier this week, we noted "The Mojave Experiment," Microsoft's new, unorthodox ad campaign for its Vista operating system. We argued that while the campaign certainly breaks new ground in a refreshing way, in that it acknowledges the Vista-hating phenomenon...
Selling to a Belt-Tightened Customer
In case you hadn't heard the news, the economy is not so hot at the moment. But what are you supposed to do about that? Unless you have a time machine on hand, you are for a while going...
Turning your Business into a Local, National and International Buzz
It was almost two years ago at a cocktail party, when I was surprised to see none other than, Secretary of Commerce, Carlos Gutierrez, walk through the door. Though I am a person that generally rides the “left” side of...
Necessity, the Mother of Innovation
Our business, artstream, has combined three facets in the area of art and design to create one business under one roof. Due to our diversity, one of the main practices that we have moved away from is traditional advertising. It...
Avoiding the Marketing Blues
Even though I run a complicated business that marries a brick-and-mortar eco-friendly home furnishing showroom with its Internet counterpart and a full-service natural café, I’d say what occupies most of my attention is marketing. In a way, this is a...
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