Death by discount

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.

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In and Out

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.

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Shan or Han?

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.

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Being Known, or Being Found?

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.

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Can you pass me a Kleenex…?

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’.

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It’s not hard to say ‘thank you’

Continuing from my rant last month about the lack of personalised email marketing, this time I’d like to delve into some of the smaller (but very important) elements of managing an email database: thankyou pages, double (and triple) opt ins, and auto responders.

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Email marketing? Epic fail

Many companies use email marketing. But in my opinion, no company uses it properly, or realises its immense potential. No-one has seemed to work out that it’s today’s catalogue, today’s shop front, and today’s sales person. Let me tell you why email marketing is the most important marketing tool you will ever have.

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