Dave Rosenberg of CNET.com, reports that “a new report (PDF) published by the Joan Ganz Clooney Center at Sesame Workshop discusses the potentially positive effects of video games in educating children and promoting their physical well-being. (And if you can’t trust the fine people at Sesame Workshop, who can you trust?)”
If video games really are positive for kids, how can marketers effectively market the educational merit of video games to parents while keep kids entertained?
In a time where many airlines charge hidden fees for everything, this article in the NY Times discusses how Air New Zealand charges everything up front, so there is nothing to hide on their fares. Other carries like Jetstar and Pacific Blue holds the majority of the market share, but that hasn’t stopped Air New Zealand from being innovative. Their “Bare Essentials of Safety” video gave the airline just the attention it needed. The video has been seen more than two million times on YouTube, making it the most viewed clip to come out of New Zealand.
Office gophers rejoice as Dunkin Donuts makes getting coffee for the entire office so much easier. Thanks to a new program available on the iPhone (with supplementary website), users will be able to combine social networking with coffee consumption–a 2.0 version of Central Perk.
From Brandweek, “Participating customers create a list of friends and colleagues who are alerted when the Dunkin’ “runner” is heading to Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee or pastries. These contacts can then put in an order, and the requests are flowed into a group checklist, which the Runner can print out and bring to the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts location, or view on an iPhone. These contacts can also register on the site themselves to personalize a list of favorite items or track previous orders.”
How will DD market this new service to their audience? Will it be only for office workers–or will they expand to the 18-24 demographic?
The FDA was concerned about Bextra’s claims for use in acute pain and the FDA specifically denied the request of the pharmaceutical company to approve it in 2001. The FDA told the pharmaceutical company that they could not approve the drug for a myriad of other uses. According to Pharmaceutical Online, “the FDA was concerned about the results of a study in which there was an excess of cardiovascular events in patients who had undergone coronary artery bypass graft surgery and used Bextra.”
But marketer, Mary Holloway of Branchburg, New Jersey, thought otherwise. She knowingly marketed Bextra for the specific uses not approved by the FDA and even instructed her staff of 100 to do this same. Holloway has been sentenced by United States Magistrate Judge Judith Dein to pay a $75,000 fine and twenty-four months of probation after pleading guilty to an Information charging her with distribution of a misbranded drug.
What possessed Holloway to knowingly go against the FDA’s regulation and potentially putting consumers of the drug Bextra at risk?
Bextra was pulled from the market in 2005.
For more information on Holloway and the Bextra case, please visit the referenced article here.
Pharmaceutical Company Manager Sentenced For Off-Label Marketing
According to Forrester, the spend on email marketing will rise to $2 billion by 2014. A reason for this is the declining CPI and a high ROI. Marketers will also continue to work on reaching their target market through social media efforts, finding a connection between social and email inboxes. Read the full article here.
There are a lot of online survey tools available these days that allow you to do one-off research projects for next to nothing. While these inexpensive tools are relatively fast and easy to use, they don’t always yield quality results on which you can base important decisions. Why compromise? There are ways to do quality research without breaking the bank. Let us tell you how.
Join us to hear how your peers are doing high-quality research on very limited budgets. Our panel of experts will discuss their experiences and provide real-life examples of how they’ve been able to do it. During this one-hour webinar you’ll learn:
* Five simple guidelines for doing quality research
* How a panel can reduce your research cost and improve quality
* What companies are doing to deal with “professional” survey respondents
* When is it a good idea to call in the experts
* And much more…
Facilitator:
Mike Waite
Panelists:
Chris Schroll, Senior Manager Strategic Research & Analysis, Wolters Kluwer
Pat Merrill, Founder/General Partner, Merrill Research
and other research leaders from Fortune 500 firms
Register below, make sure to mention priority code MWS0025BLOG
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/375147800
This is why companies need to continue to invest in business meetings. Not only will those who attend gain new and fresh perspectives from other attendees, but they’ll hear from top companies who have lived by the same philosophy. Investment in yourself and innovation are the key to your business. What have you done recently to invest in your business?
Will you be attending one of IIR’s Marketing events this year? What do you want to gain from the experience?
At the Market Research Bulletin, they look at what some of the luxury brands are doing to to cut costs and find smarter places to source their goods and labor. In an effort to manage costs better, raw materials have become a part of the company’s supply chain. For example, Hermes now owns several crocodile farms in Australia, and Adler goes directly to Peru, Vietnam and China for their textile and pottery needs. Find out more at Market Research Bulletin.
With the numbers of patrons eating out in restaurants, they’ve had to find another way to keep their businesses on the customers mind. Many restaurants have turned to grocery store aisles to do this. Starbucks, Dunkin Doughnuts, Burger King and the California Pizza Kitchen are just a few that have found success for their providing customers a way to treat themselves without eating out.
California Pizza Kitchen co-chief executive Rick Rosenfield said, “Our comparable restaurant sales are down. People are trading down to supermarkets and we’re softening the blow by being there for them.”
Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal.
In yesterday’s New York Times, Louise Story writes on the “new” banks that have emerged during the American financial crisis. From Ally to Redneck (we aren’t joking) the banks are simply renamed versions of older banks. Ally is the lender formally GMAC and the American International Group, which owns A.I.U. Redneck is the new name for the online arm of plain old Bank of the Wichitas.
Story writes, some banks are working hard to polish their images. GMAC Bank, by dint of its name and the billions of bailout dollars that GMAC has received, smacks of Detroit and the tumble-down car industry. So in May the company rechristened its online bank Ally, as in friend.
What will “rechristening” mean for these older banks. Will customers be won by the warm and fuzzy advertising campaigns, the “friendly” approach with banking–or have the wounds inflicted on the economy by the banks make for an even harder sell?
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