For most consumers food can optionally be healthy, but it has to be tasty. And many consumers associate “healthy” with medicine or other things that won’t taste good. So maybe you don’t promote the health claims, even when your food is. Continue reading

According to a HubSpot blog post, “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” That’s as good a definition as I’ve seen, so I’ll give them a hat tip for it. Continue reading

Marketing technology produces vast amounts of data for marketers, and it can be supplemented by purchased second and third party data. But for many companies their omni-channel marketing efforts are seriously hampered by siloed data. Continue reading

Kim Kardashian West has over 48 million followers on Twitter, 29 million on Facebook and 84 million on Instagram. Even with some overlap among them, that’s a huge following. And even if a post is only displayed to a few percent of her following, which is typical, it will have millions of impressions. She often posts the same content on all three channels, resulting in hundreds of thousands of likes, shares and comments, extending the reach of her posts even further. A single post from her on all three channels has far more impressions than if it were an ad in most publications. Continue reading

Yesterday I wrote about direct mail Christmas catalogs. Today’s marketing tip about the use of direct mail in political campaigns – ‘tis the season.

Direct mail has not declined in politics in the way that it has in the catalog business; in fact, some estimates say that its use continues to increase. Obama and Romney spent over $200 million on direct mail and printing in 2012. Continue reading

With Christmas now less than three months off, our mailboxes are increasingly filled with catalogs. (And I’m not going to say that these are “holiday” catalogs; if Christmas didn’t exist we wouldn’t be seeing this surge.)

The number of catalogs is certainly less than it once was. According to the Direct Marketing Association it peaked in 2007 with over 19.6 billion catalogs being mailed. Despite a small uptick in 2013 by last year it was down to 10.6 billion. That’s still a lot of trees. Continue reading