Q&As

It’s been a very long time since September meant back-to-school for me personally. And my children are still too young for Labor Day to mean the end of playtime.

When it comes to pitching “return to school” merchandise, marketers have overlooked an elementary lesson: Know Your Market.

When you were a kid, did you ever wonder where your teacher got all those cool workbooks? Or that nifty dry erase board? No? Me neither.

Cartoon Network and several child advocacy groups – including the National Parent Teacher Association, the National Education Association, Hands on Network and the National Association for Sport & Physical Education – are partnering to sponsor National Recess Week, Sept. 18-22. The goal is to help kids, parents and teachers enhance and/or save recess in their schools.

Back in the late 1990s, Sascha Deri, an engineer working at a high-paying day job, decided he wanted to act on his childhood dream of doing something for the greater good.

Fred Ackerman

Multi-channel marketing for the small business takes many different forms. Direct mail is now supplemented, or even replaced, by electronic sales. Direct is ideal because it can be used economically by local and regional merchants to reach closely-targeted local geographic areas at a very low cost, even specific neighborhoods, like a lawn-care contractor serving geographically selected regions.

Financial services aimed at small businesses have become fashionable, but are they genuine? “In our research, we found few firms that actually had fully functional small business brokerage platforms, versus those that were designed for individuals and simply re-labeled as small business,” said Michael Ellison, executive vice president at Corporate Insight and author of the Broker Monitor report.

Islands are known for fostering a pretty relaxed definition of efficiency. Maybe it

Brands rely on incentive and premium programs to build consumer trial and loyalty. Two-thirds of respondents to PROMO’s third annual P&I Study indicated that their incentive program is designed to build consumer/brand loyalty. This year, the benchmark report includes trends in program goals, spending, ROI tracking, and much more