The Big Fat Marketing Blog

For those of you who like to give during the holiday season, and are stewards of the environment, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has expanded its catalog to provide shoppers an easy way to warm hearts and protect species and their habitats around the world.

Two years ago, WWF launched a 36-page print catalog. Now it’s 72 pages and offers unique gifts such as symbolic animal adoptions and opportunities to support specific conservation projects around the world through donations. The initiatives were selected from a priority list of WWF conservation areas around the world. more

After waxing eloquent on the glorious virtues of automation and how its going to save companies tons of money in mailing and shipping costs, the USPS did the ol’ bait and switch. During the Mailers Technical Advisory Committee meeting back in August, Postmaster General John E. “Jack” Potter announced that there will NOT be a discount for mail sent using the new intelligent mail barcode (IMB) system.

more

Have you seen the latest Esquire magazine cover with a flashing component called E Ink? It kinda reminds me of Times Square at the newsstand. Imagine a rack full of these covers, all with different messages being tested to see what message sells the most copies, yet alone the advertising messages that could be tested. Click here for more information. And I thought IKEA was an exercise in sensory overload…

In case you’ve been too wrapped up with the World Series or the presidential campaigns to follow the latest developments on the mobile-phone front, Android is an operating system developed from scratch by search power Google and aimed specifically at Web-equipped smartphones . The thinking from Mountain View CA is that actually designing and building the software that makes 3G mobile handsets work might just pay off for the search giant. more

Everybody has the occasional day when you feel powerless and incapable: When the printer jams, when your hard drive crashes, when you lose your cell phone on the bus and leave the oranges for your kid’s soccer game back on the kitchen counter. At those times, wouldn’t it help your outlook to don a cape and unitard, play a cheesy ‘70s theme song and strike a kick-ass superhero pose? more

When it comes to influencing sales conversions, blog posts can have a greater impact on customer buying decisions than marketing messages delivered via social networks, according to a new study from Jupiter Research and social media analysis company Buzzlogic. more