What people love, they will pay for. The businesses that most successfully engage with their customers via social media are those that understand what their customers love.

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The Chinese economy has surprised bankers by bouncing back rapidly from the financial downturn.
Between April and June, gross domestic product expanded by an annual 7.9 per cent, meaning the country is likely to hit its target of eight per cent annual growth.
GDP growth was 6.1 per cent in the first quarter, but [...]

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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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Britain’s retail experts are shifting promotional priorities in-store this summer as classic footfall drivers like advertising, sponsorship and celebrity endorsements fail to halt declining customer numbers on the high street: So says a new retail study released by Norway-headquartered software solutions provider Mohive.
The study, which collates the experiences and opinions of more than 100 retail [...]

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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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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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HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS explores the perceived wisdom of the use of negatives in copy.
In my callow youth, I taught English literature at a minor US university. There, I solidified my impious opinion that Wordsworth should have been considered a minor poet. But Wordsworth had a line in his ode, ‘Intimations of Immortality’:
‘The sunshine is a glorious birth.’
So [...]

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Permission marketing experts Rosemary Smith and Jenny Moseley lift the veil on privacy notices.
Be honest, do you always read and fully understand privacy notices when you submit your personal data? If the answer is ‘No’ you would not be alone.
Earlier this year, a You Gov poll in the UK revealed that half  of consumers don’t [...]

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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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Liane Dietrich, UK managing director of affiliate network, LinkShare, assesses the rise in international online shopping and the marketing strategies brands need to employ to increase their revenue.
With the recession in full swing and high street sales continuing to tumble across much of the western world, the last 12 months have seen consumers turn to [...]

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