71 Results

Once upon a time the word “artisan” meant something had been carefully hand made. Now you can buy Domino’s Artisan pizza and artisan sandwiches from Starbucks. Bruce Horovitz opines on the newest marking cliché.

Crikey readers have their say.

Here’s a note of PR advice from Tim Burrowes: don’t send out your company press releases with the “track changes” function still enabled on the Microsoft Word document. Otherwise the whole internet gets to witness your embarrassing marketing lingo.

As a long term practitioner and teacher of research methods, Eva Cox wants to set the record straight by pointing out the apparent gross misuse of a very useful tool — focus groups.

MasterChef is a rich source of knowledge, and not just about how to make the perfect strogonoff or red wine jus. James Thomson has five ideas inspired by the show to kickstart your business.

Mint explains the simple but surprisingly effective marketing tactic of “price anchoring”: stick a product’s price next to a much higher one, and it will suddenly seem like a steal.

MTV is hawking its popular reality TV series Jersey Shore (it’s a “young people live in a house together” variant) to audiences around the world. Gawker has a fascinating look at the different ways it’s being pitched to different countries, from India to England.

He’d seen the trailers, saw the ad in the paper, headed down on opening night to his local Hoyts cinema, yet didn’t see the film because he couldn’t buy a ticket. Tim Burrowes explains how Hoyts threw the sale away.

Seth Godin offers advice on how an African chocolate company should package their chocolate. Sure, it involves some glamorising of poverty, but it’s a great marketing idea.

Seminal jam band The Grateful Dead didn’t just develop their cult following through their fusion of psychedelic rock and hallucinogenic drugs (though that helped): they actually pioneered a range of marketing practices that have since been embraced by the corporate world.

The buzz around this week’s big reveal of Apple’s new tablet computer has reached fever pitch. How does the company generate the kind hype others would pay billions for without spending a dime?

Twitter ain’t no time waster down at Dell, with promotions on Dell’s 35 various Twitter accounts responsible for bringing US$6.5 million in sales of personal computers.

Megan Lane appeared on radio and TV yesterday as an angry Telstra customer as part of the company’s new “My Telstra Experience” campaign, but Crikey can reveal that Lane worked as a Telstra spin doctor until 2002, writes Andrew Crook.

The latest Aussie snack food to jump on the “name our new product” bandwagon is SupaShake. 20-year-old marketing blogger Zac Martin explains how he has ended up running the $100k campaign for one of the new flavours.

Some battery egg producers are giving their cartons a green sheen so dazzling, it threatens to blind consumers to the nature of their egg-laying process, writes Crikey intern Aaron Flanagan.