The Big Fat Marketing Blog

From the “You Can’t Make It Up Department”, here is a followup to a Feb. 11 post involving a vacuum purchase at Sears. more

Aaaah, the smell of freshly mowed grass conjures scenes of backyard picnics, warm sunshine and bare feet. Here in the Northeast those days are not too far away and a new marketing campaign from TruGreen reinforces that long-awaited reality. Direct mail pieces are arriving at consumers’ homes that emit a whiff of the newly cut green stuff.

The fresh smell of grass in the TruGreen campaign reminds us that scent marketing can be an important part of the marketing mix. It has an immediate impact on consumers’ senses—good or bad—and can spark impulse purchases. more

Joe Corbett, chief financial officer for the U.S. Postal Service, said he’s “encouraged” By President Obama’s intended efforts regarding the problems – financial and otherwise – plaguing the USPS. more

Here’s a sweet tale of customer service surprise and delight. Yesterday, Russell Stover Candies made my day by doing a second follow-up via mail on a customer service complaint I’d forgotten about, resulting in a very happy and (again) loyal customer and promoting a product revamp in the process.

I don’t smoke and I don’t drink (well, not much). But I do obsess on certain types of hard to find or seasonal candy. I love Godiva’s pumpkin truffles, available only in the fall. I adore Nestle Smarties, which you can only find in the U.S. in shops that carry sweets imported from Canada or Europe.

But the granddaddy of my candy fervor? Russell Stover’s chocolate coconut nests, sold at Easter time. They’re just perfect little nests of chocolate and coconut, with three little jelly bean eggs nestled inside. Well, that’s how they were, until—horrors!—they removed the jelly beans in 2010. (Cue the ominous music.)

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It’s rare that marketing story which doesn’t focus on jingles will leave one with an earworm, but that was exactly the result of a recent set of interviews.

A conference call for a piece on how the Dole Salad Mobile Club and the Price Chopper supermarket chain used QR codes in a recent mail test had gone well. (Long story short: Lapsed members within the Price Chopper loyalty program responded better – but differences in the offer may have been partly responsible.) more

My wife loves the E-Trade ads with the talking baby. Actually, she loves the talking baby, not the ads or its content, and comments how much so every time we see the commercial, and that is the problem. Funny, cute, clever ads that sell are the exception to the rule. E-Trade’s talking baby ad campaign is well done, arguably memorable but it does not convince you to do business with them. Isn’t the point of most advertising and marketing to sell more of your wares?

It’s not just my opinion, here’s what Bloomberg’s Business Week wrote about the E-Trade spots.

Have you switched to E-Trade if you were in the market to do so based upon seeing the cute infant? I didn’t think so.

I would argue that today, more than ever, being creative is more about selling your stuff than making me laugh.

What ads make you want to buy, switch or run from the product being pitched?