The Big Fat Marketing Blog

If you’re not aware, there’s a quite entertaining discussion going on in the blogosphere re Starbucks and exactly what the brand should be providing to users. Coffee certainly, and biscotti without a doubt. But are unlimited electricity and available seating also implied in the brand promise?

The spark for the dispute has been a note in the independent Starbucks Gossip blog that some midtown Manhattan Starbucks units have taken to covering up power outlets in the customer areas in an effort to get laptop squatters to move along. Reportedly, the policy is being applied on a store-by-store basis at the managers’ discretion. more

That’s the question that mailers around the country are anxious to find out.

President Obama’s proposals left many in Congress and in the world of multichannel retail unimpressed.

Obama is pushing for five-day delivery – eliminating Saturday mail – and allowing the U.S. Postal Service to sell items other than stamps and shipping supplies at post offices nationwide, according to his deficit reduction proposals. more

Back when Netflix first announced a new two-tiered price structure, I said that the abrupt email disclosure of the new business model—with separate fees for people streaming movies and getting them via DVD—was a mistake. (”Netflix Price Plan Lays PR Egg“.)Turns out, I was right. In a post yesterday on the Netflix blog and in an accompanying YouTube video, CEO Reed Hastings admitted that the company dropped the ball on communicating with its customers a pricing change that could amount to doubling the cost of using the service.

According to Hastings, that failure to communicate clearly with its fans has been Netflix’s primary misstep in the past few months—months that have seen a migration away from the company’s service, so that instead of adding 400,000 subscribers this quarter as it once forecast, the service will actually lose 600,000 users.



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I get SO many marketing emails every day that sometimes I end up deleting giant blocks of them, especially on a Monday morning. But I noticed a few subject lines from emails this past weekend that at least made me click through to see what they were talking about.

A subject line from J. Jill: “Strike a chord of your own. Plus $20 off $80.” Hmmm, I bet that’s about corduroy. more

I like cake. I like QR codes. I don;t really like waiting around in banks, but my dealings with a probate issue and customer appreciation day at my local People’s United Bank branch gave me a sweet item to blog about.

People’s is using a QR code as part of its personal checking account promotion. And they just happened to have to promo put on a cake. And People’s did such a great job with the promotion (cake included) that I felt I should tell you why I feel this way. more

I saw this sign on a gas pump last Tuesday while I was driving to Boston for the Shop.org Annual Summit. And it made me feel 10 years younger.

Even if Irving is piloting its rewards program, it shouldn’t be so 20th-century user-friendly (oxymoron) about it. Heck, barcode scanners were being used in the 20th century, and the cost to install those, and issue key fobs with barcodes on them, has to have gone down immensely since 1999. more