Read more about it: HERE
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: Facebook, Omniture, Social Media
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: Bouf.com, colour changing wallpaper, thermochromatic
Supermarket advertising in the UK seems to largely revolve around price reduction or celebrity chef endorsement. The quality of the food, or how to do something new and different with it, also gets an occasional mention.
But when was the last time you perceived you gained great value, or even savings, from the products you purchased at a supermarket? I believe it happens more often than you think – ask Waitrose and Aldi customers for example. But the larger supermarket chains that dominate the the middle ground have perhaps the harder task in demonstrating differentiation with their value offering, either from price savings or product quality.
In recent weeks there have been reports in the UK press that the prices of some products increased by more than 50% in supermarkets during the run up to Christmas. Examples compared prices for batteries and fizzy drinks from December and earlier in 2009 and appeared to support this price hike claim.
But now The Guardian newspaper have claimed that the majority of price reductions by Tesco and Asda were cuts of only 1p per item; while more items saw increases of 10p or over in the same period from these supermarkets. The Guardian infer there is cynical price manipulation by the supermarkets.
Without all the data, which changes daily, for all the major supermarkets and tracked over a number of months; it’s very difficult to draw a robust independent conclusion. But it’s easy to see how stories such as this fuel the perception that supermarket prices, on the whole, aren’t getting any cheaper.
Read the comment in Marketing Week: Here
Tesco’s response to the suggestion of price manipulation was, “We do not manipulate prices in this cynical way.”
If only consumer perception was as easy to sway as it was to issue this simple denial.
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: Asda, Marketing Week, Supermarket Pricing, Tesco, The Guardian, Waitrose
An interesting report from emarketer: HERE
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: emarketer.com, Johnson 7 Johnson
Time magazine list the 10 most uncomfortable press conferences: HERE
1. Sticky Situations – Teary T.O.
2. So, About That Appalachian Trail Thing …
3. Robert Gibbs Gets Testy
4. Lance Armstrong’s Fighting Words
5. Women’s Basketball Is Emotional
6. Bush Bows Out
7. Transparency to an Extent
8. Blagojevich Skirts the Issue
9. Larry Craig: ‘I Am Not… ‘
10. We’re Talkin’ ‘Bout Practice!
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: Time
An interesting article from The Harvard Business Review’s Daily Stat.
They claim weaker businesses suffer margin swings of 3x to 5x those experienced by the market leaders during economic downturns.
Read more: HERE
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: Harvard Business Review, The Daily Stat
“One speaks Spanish to gods, French to men, Italian to women, and German to horses. One never speaks foul English to anyone ever.”
De Gaulle
Thanks go to Dave Trott for tweeting this quote.
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: Dave Trott, De Gaulle
Hazardous Sequins?
In recent days Toyota and Honda have both announced car recalls, due to safety concerns. But here is a completely different product I spotted an urgent recall notice for.
Just how many loose sequins does it take for a dress to be classified as a hazard?
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: Product Recall, Sequin Dress
Lost Season 6 Kicks Off
The final Season of Lost has started on ABC in the US and on Sky 1 in the UK.
Like many I will be downloading my Lost fix from iTunes. But the Peer to Peer file share servers are no-doubt set to do brisk business over coming weeks; as people around the world clamour to see the latest episodes.
Catch a re-cap of all that happened in Season 5: HERE
Clips for Season 6: HERE
The Launch Party in Hawaii
The Merchandise goes Bobblehead crazy; or is this what really became of the Dharma Initiative?
With Flash Forward off air in the UK, I finally have a new programme to watch again.
Will Terry O’Quinn, who plays John Locke, have the character with the most interesting development and action again in these last few episodes? Or will Nestor Carbonell’s role, as Richard Alpert, finally come into its own ?
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: ABC, Bobblehead, Lost; Lost Season 6
Interesting article in The Times Online: HERE
The article includes reference to the launch of the new McItaly burger, that sold 100,000 in one day. This product is entirely sourced from local produce in the country.
There is also information on how McDonald’s responded to the recession by introducing products at a new mid-price point and attracting new customers to the restaurants.
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: McDonald's, The Times Online
The British Library have scanned tens of thousands of books in their fiction archive from the 19th Centrury and are preparing to make them available for free download.
Users of Kindle and other ebook readers will be able to access over 65,000 books initially, including works from Charles Dickens, Jane Austin and Thomas Hardy.
Over 35% of the works being released are believed to be unavailable in other public libraries and difficult to find in second-hand or internet bookshops. Whilst such scarcity may reflect poor quality in the literature in many cases, The British Library recognise that publishers and marketing influence the public’s taste for fiction. So there may well be hundreds of literary gems amongst the huge hoarde of content that is being made available.
The works are digitised from the original books, rather than scanned and re-typeset via OCR software. So the digital versions should retain some of the look of the original printed pages.
The collection is to be made available for free download by the public from this spring.
Read more in The Times Online: HERE
The British Library online is: HERE
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: The British Library, The Times Online
While few brands have so far employed augmented reality as anything other than a digital media novelty. The kid’s fashion brand Brights and Stripes are now embracing the fun aspect of augmented reality in a new clothing range.
Does this result in what the brand claim is Experiential Clothing? Or simply a fun gimmick to amuse the kids? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between the two?
Check out the article and video: HERE
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: Augmented Reality, Brights and Stripes
The Obama camp famously embraced social media in helping build the support that led to victory in their Presidential campaign.
But the newly installed team in the White House soon found out that when you invite people to tell you what they think, their thoughts may not be quite what you had in mind.
One of the pre-election tools for the Obama campaign included the facility for people to propose new legislation and then have others vote on the ideas put forward. The hope was that popular causes and issues would be easily identified and perhaps become part of the campaign pledge.
This unfortunately backfired, when the wish to legalise canabis for medical use become the suggestion with the most votes of support.
Over a year later and Citizen Tube have released their Top 10 for the strangest questions people wanted to ask President Obama. Citizen Tube interviewed the President yesterday on YouTube and invited the public to send in questions for the interview.
They received over 11,000 questions. The most bizarre are: Here
The Top 10
- Most colourful questions the public wanted to ask President Obama:
1. “For most of my life I was raised in West Philadelphia. Finances forced me to move to Bel Air with my Aunt and Uncle. What are you going to do about areas like the one I lived in?”
- William Smith, Los Angeles
2. “How do you feel about Nancy Peloci capturing our attention with her cat cam, then rick rolling us in the end?”
- Anonymous
3. “Why did you name your dog, Bo, after yourself?”
- Mary Smithiers, Seattle
4. “Why does God hate the Vikings?”
- Depressed, Minnesota
5. “Could you win in a fight against Wolverine? Don’t even pretend like you could, you totally can’t.”
- Jack, Redding, CA
6. Mr. President, when are you going to stop the war between ninjas and pirates? Surely it is in your hands to stop such a crisis. The war has been going for trillions of years and it needs to be put to a halt once and for all.”
- Daniel, New Zealand
7. “Do you play World of Warcraft? If yes, which class and faction do you have?”
- Gustaffa, Slovakia
8. “I know I speak for a lot of Americans when I say we love you and believe in you. Do you pinky-swear to try your hardest to push through some of the legislation you talked about last night? Remember: the pinky-swear is binding in court.”
- Justin, Carmen Sandiego
9. Mr. President, there is no doubt that you are a busy and stressed man. My question relates to your “down time”. I just want to know if you like to go fishing and if so, would it be possible for me to go fishing with you one day?”
- Robert B., Keller, TX
10. “Mr. President, I just want to tell you how I’m feeling, America is not gonna give you up, nor let you down. We are not going to desert you. How do you feel about Internet censorship?”
- Broghan, Virginia
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: Crowd Sourcing, Digital, Obama, President Obama
An interesting article on best practice in mobile crowd sourcing from Global Intelligence Alliance: HERE
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: Crowd Sourcing, Digital, Mobile
Nokia unveil the digital campaign that allows consumers to participate in SMS messaging onto the world’s largest signpost.
See the video: HERE
Filed under: 2010 February | Leave a Comment
Tags: Digital, Largest signpost, Nokia
Internet Stats 2009
90 trillion emails, 30 billion photo uploads to Facebook, 1.73 billion internet users, 234 million websites, 187 million domain names, 126 million blogs. Yes, the numbers behind digital activity in 2009 are simply astounding.
Throw in 1 billion video downloads each day on YouTube for good measure and you start to wonder if people have time to keep up with their digital lives?
Read all the details at Royal Pingdom: HERE
Filed under: 2010, January | Leave a Comment
Tags: Internet Stats, Royal Pingdom
A new report from RJMetrics has indicated 83% of Twitter accounts were inactive in December 2009.
While Twitter is still attracting around 6.2 million new users each month, the report also found that 80% of Twitter users had Tweeted fewer than 10 times.
Let’s hope the inactive accounts belong to those who only Tweet the banal and trivial; such ‘going for coffee’ or ’stuck in traffic.’
If you spend time hunting down appropriate sources to follow, you may learn many new and interesting things from Twitter users. But there is an ocean of triviality for every drop of wisdom.
Read Robert Moore’s report at RJMetrics: HERE
Read comment from Furlong PR: HERE
Filed under: 2010, January | Leave a Comment
Tags: RJMetrics, Robert Moore, Twitter
Recent Entries
- Omniture extend Facebook advertising and metrics
- Thermochromatic Colour Changing Wallpaper
- The Guardian investigate cynical price reduction claims at supermarkets
- How Johnson & Johnson target Mums through an online community
- Time Magazine’s Top 10 Awkward Press Conferences
- Weaker businesses suffer margin swings 3x or 5x those of the market leaders
- One never speaks English to anyone, ever.
- Hazardous Sequins?
- Lost Season 6 Kicks Off
- McDonald’s benefit from a local value strategy
- British Library release 65,000 works of 19th Century fiction for download
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