Promotions

Both Zynga, the online games company whose offerings include Farmville, Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker, and Groupon, the daily deal site, are dot-coms which deal primarily in virtual goods. They hold no physical inventory and rarely generate transactions that result in drop-shipped deliveries.

Despite this, the Zynga IPO, unlike the one presented by daily deal firm Groupon, doesn’t make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. The differences are rooted in how each company presents and markets itself. more

Consumers like when a brand ties a promotion to its namesake, like this one: the “7Wonders of the USA Teacher Tour” from Wonder Bread. First, it makes it easy to understand and immediately draws the connection between the brand and the promotion. Second, consumers like a cause-marketing campaign, and third, they like the campaign even more when it involves teachers.

So, under those unscientific consumer-marketing requirements for a promotion, Wonder Bread is serving up three stars. more

A few months ago, apropos of nothing, my 86-year-old mother turned to me and said “You know, I don’t think that much of that Lady Gaga.”

“Well Mom,” I replied, “that’s fine, since you’re not really her target demographic anyway.”

She looked at me a little shocked. “Do you like her?”

I replied that, yes, I did like some of her songs, and she had an interesting sense of style, but it didn’t really matter, because I’m not exactly her target audience either.

And I’m okay with that. Not everyone is the sweet spot for everything—I try to remember that when I start saying how dumb something my kids love on Cartoon Network is….maybe, I stop and think, I’m not really supposed to get this. It’s not for me.

That’s how I feel about the whole “Twilight” phenomenon. I get why teenage girls are all crazy for the moody, broody, angsty vampires, but as a (gulp) middle-aged mom, it just isn’t my thing.

That’s why I was a little taken aback by a recent email from Volvo with the subject line “Your invitation to the wedding of the century has arrived.” Wedding, what wedding? Another royal couple getting hitched? Nope. This was Volvo’s way of inviting me to get excited for their promotional tie-in to “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1.”

more

If you love “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” which millions of people do, you just may start to buy Tide laundry products, if you don’t already do.

Ellen herself is starring in a weeklong series of 3-minute “soap operas” this week sponsored by Tide and taped live during her daily talk show as part of the show’s programming. more

American Apparel sidelined one of the most important rules in marketing, if not the most important rule: Listen to your customers. Instead when it didn’t like that a women who made a mockery of the company’s search for a new plus-size model—in one photo dousing herself in ranch dressing and lounging (in a sexy pose) in a tub full of the calorie-rich stuff—actually won, it sent her an email basically telling her to bug off.

That did not sit well. The 24-year-old Nancy Upton, a Texas student, is a size 12 and submitted the photos to send a message to American Apparel that plus-size women would like to be treated the same as every other female, as beautiful, not as women who need “extra wiggle room,” who are “bootyfull, eat too much, are lazy and don’t take care of themselves,” Upton told the “Today Show” this morning. more

Airline loyalty programs that allow customers to earn points to redeem for air travel have long experienced in-flight turbulence. The level of participants’ satisfaction has been similar to passengers’ critique of airline food (when they had it), glad it was available, but not very good.

People work hard to earn and build miles only to become exasperated trying to redeem them for the dates and time frames they want— like kid’s school breaks. Or, we’re required to fly half way around the world with multiple stops before getting to our destination, like the trip I took to Alaska two summers ago. That’s one reason why the airlines expanded their rewards to include merchandise and other items, which has placated some customers. more