The Big Fat Marketing Blog

A new piece of research from Accenture suggests that marketing executives are increasingly handicapped by internal corporate hurdles, such as inefficient organizational practices, budget constraints and poor integration with other business functions, among others. Some of you might be thinking right now, “I didn’t need Accenture to tell me that.”

Meanwhile, the research also pointed out that customer expectations are applying more external pressure on marketers. It turns out that customers want more value for money, have higher quality expectations and want lower prices. Again, maybe not a news flash.

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In case you missed them, these were the five most popular posts on the Big Fat Marketing Blog in July:

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There’s no doubt about it: Brands were out to pick up chicks at the BlogHer ‘10 conference in New York last week, and their technique was in no way subtle.

Not that this was a bad thing, mind you. The chicks—a.k.a. women bloggers of any stripe imaginable—had no problem with being courted by marketers hoping to get the army of women of blogging every day to write about their products.

The brand immersion started with breakfast and didn’t stop. Tropicana sponsored the morning spread, which reportedly featured Bruce Jenner pouring OJ. My train didn’t get me into NYC early enough to eyeball this myself, but I did get a glimpse of what seemed like enough breakfast pastry to feed every blogger on the Internet, let alone the Hilton.

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Since the U.S. Postal Service filed its exigent rate case proposal on July 6, there has been a rather significant backlash against the rate hike — an average of 10 times the rate of inflation – that many say violates the cost controls Congress put in place to protect consumers. more

It seems Google, a company I greatly admire, has a conundrum on its hands: what to do with the treasure drove of data it has at its disposal.

The key issue, of course, is over-stepping privacy boundaries which can lead to consumer mistrust and adversely impact revenue and profits. People do not like to do business with companies that they do not trust. more

There are certain physical acts males enjoy. Some of these are focused on striking one inanimate object (baseball, football, golf ball) with another (a bat, a shoe, a club). Others involve consuming items the approximate size of a sports coupe’s engine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan’s_Hot_Dog_Eating_Contest).

Similarly, there are certain physical acts males do not enjoy. A stereotype lumps the hunter-gatherer aspects of shopping into this category, and a new study from Experian Marketing Services affirms this.

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