The Big Fat Marketing Blog

My wife and I went to a local Sears near where we live in Connecticut to buy a vacuum cleaner. Seems simple enough, right? more

A tip of the hat to Eric Kokonas of Dittoe Public Relations for forwarding this email from Dick’s Sporting Goods that creatively tackles a conundrum of many marketers: how to persuade their email subscribers to become fans and followers on social networks.

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Here’s how the Super Bowl ads fared, according to USA Today.

So, for $3,000,000 per ad, plus creative and productions costs, if you have a 15% margin (and that’s atypical), please help me justify this spend, assuming you have a 5 percent buy rate (Note: NOT response rate, but purchase rate. Assume a 10% response rate, again higher than reality). By the way, the game was the highest rated of all time.

The math speaks for itself….

Grailing, it seems, will never go out of style among certain types of data analysts, although rather than search for a Last Supper relic, most seek a suitable substitute for recency, frequency and monetary analysis.

The latest knight-errant is Jeremiah Owyang, who says that the emergence of social media has given greater weight to other data sources, and in a few cases offered information from points anew.

Owyang, a partner at Altimeter Group, maintains marketers who have a robust social media program, especially one which includes mobile efforts, have access to seven types of customer information. more

So how did Groupon react to the negative reaction to its Super Bowl ads? It seems to have issues an apology without issuing an apology. CEO Andrew Mason admits on the company’s blog that it may have offended customers, and that it wasn’t their intent.

But Groupon didn’t apologize, and some people left comments on the blog post to call Groupon out for that. Groupon claims its intent was not to trivialize causes, but the fact is they did. You can’t talk about the plight of people in Tibet and that say it’s okay because they still make a great fish curry without trivializing… and offending. more

Here’s a bit of a no-brainer: Online sales are rising, and that was even more evident this holiday season. But mobile and social are playing a bigger part in the bricks and mortar experience. Both of those channels have yet to become proven transitional feeds for retailers, but consumers are using them to help make their purchasing decisions.

Digital marketing firm Creative Realities last week served up five tips (via press release) that single-channel sellers need to take to capture the new digital-enabled consumer. But let’s face it, even if you’re a multichannel merchant, you need to get on board with the same strategies.

Here is Creative Realities’ advice, word-for-word: more