The Big Fat Marketing Blog

One of the best parts of Halloween was always dumping out the Trick or Treat bag at the end of the night, to see what kind of haul you got. I did the same with my inbox this morning. Here’s what I found.

The Natick Collection sent an email invite to their Halloween Kids Fest. It was basic and to the point, inviting boys and ghouls to an event in the mall with crafts, face painting, prizes, etc. The treat was a small link at the bottom asking how likely the reader would be to visit the mall as a result of the email. To respond, all a customer had to do was click one of five shopping bags (one not at all likely, five very likely).

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There is so much talk these days about holiday preparations and about hiring and retaining seasonal staffers. Some companies, like Fairytale Brownies, go the extra mile and offer incentives to make the holiday grind much more enjoyable.

Kim Silva, operations team leader at Fairytale Brownies, lists some of the incentives her company offers seasonal staffers: more

Mailer groups are thankful for the just-announced small postage increases but don’t think they’ll do anything substantive for the bleak financial picture of the USPS which is likely to run out of cash next summer.

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Monday’s New York Times featured a terrific column by Andrew Ross Sorkin on Groupon’s finances, as well as some reasons behind its delayed initial public offering (IPO).

Sorkin’s column is must reading for investors. Consumers have their sources of commentary on the daily deal site as well. But the company’s oft-revised IPO registration has a few tidbits for marketers, too. (The most recent amendment of its IPO registration was its fourth – and anyone who can get short odds on there being a fifth might consider floating a few bucks on the proposition.)

Groupon is coy about its dealings with participating merchants, and much of what follows is speculation, along with a few questions the company might consider answering should it issue a fifth registration proposal. 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.”

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So what do you think is the main concern facing call center executives in 2012? Here’s what more than 100 respondents said in the 2012 Call Center Summit survey.

Empowering and engaging employees to drive business results was the top response (more than 30%) to that question. more