The Big Fat Marketing Blog

You think George W. Bush was slow to respond when Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast back in 2005? They weren’t as slow as Discover Financial Services was to respond to Hurricane Irene.

I got this email from Discover on Sept. 14, more than two weeks after Irene slammed into my hometown. As you can see, Discover was concerned about “the recent disaster” that affected my “community.” Oh, and of course, that I can always count on Discover in case on an emergency. more

It’s a jungle in the exhibit hall at any trade show: The vendors are always pulling out all the stops to get the attention of people walking by. So why was everyone lingering at the Kiva Systems display at Shop.org Annual Summit in Boston earlier this week?

They were mesmerized by Kiva’s mobile-robotic warehouse automation system, also known as fulfillment robots. more

The Whole Foods/LivingSocial deal, under which one million consumers purchased $20 grocery coupons for $10, is already a win for Whole Foods. The high-end supermarket chain has received a wealth of media mentions as a result of the deal, a phenomenon which isn’t likely to be repeated for the next major marketers who sign up with LivingSocial.

So chalk the coverage up as a unique win for Whole Foods, and not necessarily a universal benefit of using LivingSocial. The bigger question is whether the actual deal itself will bring in valuable customers.

The grocery chain has already proven the value of incentivized shopping: Its “The Whole Deal” campaign, which mixes coupons, recipes, in-store value tours and other deals, generated average basket sizes of $66 during its fiscal year 2010. In contrast, its overall average basket in the same stores was $34. more

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed a lawsuit against gifts and houeswares mailer Miles Kimball, which is based in Oskosh, WI.

By now a lot of people have heard that Major League Baseball forbade members of the New York Mets from wearing caps honoring the first responders to the Sept. 11, 2011 attacks on the event’s 10th anniversary. The league officially banned team members from wearing anything but official team caps.

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(Editor’s Note: This article was penned by Bryan Duffy, executive vice president of sales and marketing at MKTG Inc., an experiential shop and posted by Patty Odell.)



Everyone has their Sept. 11 story about where they were, whom they were with, what they were doing and how it changed their outlook on life; how it altered their sense of security or patriotism. For me, it was a day I will never forget because I was in Manhattan, working for an experiential agency and the series of events that unfolded that day were in real time. From making it off the island, to struggling to get in touch with my wife, to witnessing the second tower collapse in front of my eyes—these events will stay with me forever. It is true that Sept. 11 is a day that holds a personal emotion for every U.S. citizen, but for those of us in who were in Manhattan the day the carpet was pulled out from under us, we share a common experience that none of us will soon forget.

For those of us in the marketing industry, it impacted us uniquely as well. Immediately following Sept. 11th, the industry saw a significant decline in overall activity; corporate travel was down, meetings and events were cancelled or pushed to the following season, and in general, businesses pulled back on marketing spend. The event-marketing industry in particular took a big hit. For the next year or so we waited for the government to figure out what was happening overseas while business tried to regain its footing. more