Columnist Ian Hughes says good service – which used to mark out a good company from a bad one – is now a dying art.
As I write this, the front page of USA Today announces something that I told you, my loyal readers, nearly six years ago – that supermarkets are beginning to trust [...]

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Our marketer on the ground, Simon Burrell, spent many years working in and travelling across different regions of the world    and now runs his own global travel website.  Here, he offers a marketer’s-eye view of a perfect evening.
Marketers are often trying to ‘sell you the dream’, be it a brand new exotic car, Victoria [...]

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. . . too much, says Doug Sacks, who feels swamped by inbox information.
Marketing Information overload. We all suffer from it. How do we, as eager and avid seekers of industry knowledge, winnow out the useful and important from the commonplace? The thinly disguised sales pitch? The valid but too technical information? How do providers [...]

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Our marketer on the ground, Simon Burrell, spent many years working in and travelling across different regions of the world and now runs his own global travel website.
Here, he offers a marketer’s-eye view of travel taxes.
These days, it seems Governments are keen to levy fare hikes and taxes on anyone who travels, whether it is [...]

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Columnist Ian Hughes fears that marketing practices he believes are unethical will ultimately damage the industry.
Direct marketing is looking at its greatest ever threat: new, obtrusive ways of using the medium in order to get to consumers. They are simply wrong.
Let’s be clear – they aren’t per se illegal, but that’s just because legislation hasn’t caught [...]

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Jenny Moseley – a director at Opt-4 – explains how new privacy rules surrounding electronic communications affect businesses.
With every passing day, we’re learning more about how we might deal with the new ‘Cookie Law’ (actually, a revision of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003). And it isn’t just about cookies, but all technology which [...]

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Columnist Doug Sacks rants from the USA. You can argue with him here: doug@focus-worldwide.com
Business seemed to pick up around September. Best results are for those having contracts and business with the federal government. Business in Washington, DC is booming – the rest of the country, not so much. DC building construction is rampant and traffic [...]

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Columnist Alastair Tempest reports from his base in South Africa on use of data, transparency and privacy-related principles.
I guess most of us stop really worrying about ‘the purpose of life’ after those teenage angst years. We start to take purpose as a given and not really question it  – the purpose of being in business, [...]

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Columnist Ian Hughes rants about the latest issues affecting our industry. This time, he debates whether businesses should befriend social media and says: Elephants are not social, either!
Back in 2000, I remember giving lectures about the fact that businesses need to  get on to the Internet. ‘If you don’t, you will die,’ was my rough [...]

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Columnist Herschell Gordon Lewis takes a quick look at tiny but effective words and their usage among marketers.
First published in DMI, August 2003.
The World Wide Web has brought fresh emphasis to the value of proper word selection. Emailers who don’t know the difference between ‘eager’ and ‘anxious’, or, for that matter, the impact-difference between ‘a’ [...]

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