With the Christmas sales and specials bombarding our TV screens and letterboxes, it's a great time to talk about the biggest dilemma in the world of retail - discounting.

PR is a part of the marketing mix that tends to vary in popularity. With the rise of social media, blogging, forums, reviews and other online mechanisms, PR is becoming increasingly difficult to control and respond to. However with some careful planning and common sense, PR can work wonders for your business for little to no cost.

At the Box we’re big advocates of IP protection, and it regularly pains us to see businesses who don’t understand its importance and suffer for it. One recent example which is making headlines is the battle between Shan and Han’s Cafe.

A subject of great debate in the Jack in the box office recently was, can search engine marketing be used as a branding tool? By concentrating on search engine marketing do you leave your brand behind? Do searchers just view you as another name-less online supplier? Let me show you how search engine marketing can be used in a totally different way to not only build your brand, but take it to completely new places.

In researching content for our Albany workshop this week, I stumbled across an interesting legal term: a genericised trademark. In a nutshell, this describes an evolution of a trademark to a generic descriptor of a class of product or service - like ‘googling’ instead of ‘searching’ or ‘bandaid’ instead of ‘plaster’.