The 12th annual Top 500 Superbrands survey, identifying the UK’s strongest consumer brands by polling the British public, has launched and reaffirms the success of the fast food chains and multiple supermarkets in the economic downturn.
Some of the brands showing the strongest year-on-year improvement in the survey include McDonald’s, which rises 227 places, Burger King, [...]

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DMI columnist Rosemary Smith has been elected to the UK Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) Roll of Honour, along with fellow direct marketing stalwart Charles Ping.
They were honoured in recognition of their outstanding service to the direct marketing industry. The accolade has only been conferred on 24 direct marketers, the most recent of whom was another DMI [...]

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Hundreds of US-based direct marketers, agencies and service providers are offering glimmers of hope for direct marketing jobseekers, according to the latest Bernhart Associates employment update.
“It appears the direct marketing job market is scraping the bottom,”  reports Jerry Bernhart, principal of Bernhart Associates Executive Search, a direct marketing recruiting firm which has been issuing quarterly [...]

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UK business experts say the worst of the recession is over – but warn against complacency.
The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) – whose survey of 5,600 businesses is released today – says recovery will be fragile but pointed to progress in the manufacturing and service sectors in the second quarter of the year and a [...]

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When it comes to pinpointing the population which most enjoys social networking, new research from conScore shows the Russians to be world leaders.
Visitors in the market spend 6.6 hours on social networks, viewing more than 1,300 pages each a month. The country’s leading social networking site is Vkontakte.ru, which has 59 per cent reach among [...]

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Media and marketing trade associations from across America – including the USA Direct Marketing Association (DMA) – have joined forces to release self-regulatory principles which protect consumer privacy in ad-supported interactive media; requiring advertisers and [...]

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The UK Call Centre & Customer Management Expo is being held September 22-23, at Birmingham’s NEC. Here’s a preview:
Issues of offshoring and outsourcing are once again making headlines, with industry commentators suggesting that more companies are looking to outsource their marketing fulfilment and customer services in order to provide a more flexible, scalable solution.
The benefits [...]

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Let’s have a little more conversation and a little less communication, says Ian Hughes.
Apparently I am being followed. Somewhere, out there in the ether, someone is following my Twitter feed.
You can follow me, too: @ianchughes. You can also ‘Facebook’ me: I am Ian Hughes (no surprise there). Oh, and I am on LinkedIn. I used [...]

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Susanne Hornikel looks at direct marketing trends in the Polish marketplace.
Poland is – after the Russian Federation and Ukraine – the largest central European country with a surface of 322,500 km2 and approximately 38.48 million inhabitants. Outside the major cities, Poland is a vast nature reserve with a total of 23 national parks.
Almost 90 per [...]

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Stephan Merz is aiming to keep us up-to-date with ever-changing regulations.
Over the past nine months, the German direct marketing industry has been monitoring the arguments concerning changes to our privacy law, and lobbying over potential increased enforcement of sanctions which are already in place for any violations of the rules.
When I last reported in this [...]

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