The Big Fat Marketing Blog

Women’s apparel, gifts and home decor items cataloger/retailer Anthropologie and its parent company Urban Outfitters are often held up as paragons of innovative merchandising.

While many of its competitors struggle, Urban Outfitters’ unique product continues to make the company a relative retail bright spot during this steep and lingering recession.

So how does the company find all that cool stuff? If you have cable, you can get an inside look at the process courtesy of a new series on the Sundance channel called “Man Shops Globe.” more

I wrote this piece yesterday for Multichannel Merchant about updated Federal Trade Commission guidelines that will force bloggers who receive swag or cash in exchange of a blog post to disclose their relationship with product or service.

And after I heard Emilio Amodei, founder of BlogVertise, discuss how his company can get your product blogged about by hundreds of bloggers, I had a red flag go up.

I can see someone with a product or a service wanting to get exposed by bloggers back in 2005 or before. But now we’re in an era of product ratings and recommendations. And consumers are savvy enough to go to, say, Amazon.com and see what people who have used a certain product has to say about it, rather than trusting Joe Blogger who may just say nice things for the payout.

It’s all a matter of trust, and I think Joe Consumer is going to trust sites with ratings and recommendations before a blogger.

What do you think? Is the blogosphere a reputable enough place yet? Or for that matter, are readers smart enough to see a product pitch as a product pitch?

I wrote this piece yesterday for Multichannel Merchant about updated Federal Trade Commission guidelines that will force bloggers who receive swag or cash in exchange of a blog post to disclose their relationship with product or service.

And after I heard Emilio Amodei, founder of BlogVertise, discuss how his company can get your product blogged about by hundreds of bloggers, I had a red flag go up.

I can see someone with a product or a service wanting to get exposed by bloggers back in 2005 or before. But now we’re in an era of product ratings and recommendations. And consumers are savvy enough to go to, say, Amazon.com and see what people who have used a certain product has to say about it, rather than trusting Joe Blogger who may just say nice things for the payout.

It’s all a matter of trust, and I think Joe Consumer is going to trust sites with ratings and recommendations before a blogger.

What do you think? Is the blogosphere a reputable enough place yet? Or for that matter, are readers smart enough to see a product pitch as a product pitch?