Author: Dylan Kissane
Among all of the stories about English Premier League football team Leicester City and their dream 2015-16 season that have circulated as the team tightened its grip on the premiership there is one that stood out as something extra special. No, it wasn’t the tale of how the team recruited, then elevated a 5th division player to their first-line of attack. And it’s not the way that the team has made the most of their relatively limited salary budget and outplayed every other team in the league. And it’s not about their journeyman manager who went from international embarrassment to…
Welcome to the week! The sunshine has come to DOZ. Well, not just to DOZ, but to the northern hemisphere in general, I guess. The spring weather is keeping everyone upbeat, there are chirping birds, there are flowers flowering, the leaves are green, and the pollen – that damned pollen – is everywhere. Personally I’m somewhere between “Isn’t this the most wonderful weather” and “I can’t stop sneezing”. Ah, spring – the hay fever down payment you have to make to collect the summer to come, right? As the temperature heats up so does the marketing year. Conference season has…
What are the biggest holidays for consumer spending each year? According to figures from the National Retail Federation holiday and special event spending totaled nearly $800 billion in 2015 and is expected to rise again 2016. But not all holidays are the same, of course. The Winter Holidays with Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah, and New Years Eve all within the space of about five weeks is the biggest of all accounting for more than $620 billion in consumer spending and around 75% of all holiday spending across the year. Other big holidays include Valentine’s Day ($20 billion), Easter ($16 billion), the…
There was a time that Facebook was mostly about sharing status updates and uploading images from your vacation. The audience was mostly young, the reach was large but Facebook was still ‘just another site’, and if you wanted news or entertainment then you went to a site that specialized in such things. Those days are long gone. Today Facebook is an ecosystem all of its own and is not only the first stop for many people seeking news and entertainment, it might even be the only stop for some people who realize they can get tailored information feeds customized just…
Of all of the social networks fighting for the attention and home screens of users the world over, Snapchat is perhaps the most exciting. At the end of 2015 Snapchat was clearly the fastest growing of the social messaging and social networking apps, with the International Business Times reporting that: …the 4-year-old mobile app is the fastest-growing social network among millennials, according to a survey from Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. About 36 percent of Americans ages 18-29 have a Snapchat account, the survey found. That’s up by 8 percent compared with a year ago. Facebook is still ranked as…
Welcome to the week! It’s May and springtime is well and truly here. May means different things to different people. If you’re in the United States then it’s National Burger Month. If a Big Mac is not your style, it is also National Golf Month, National Bike Month, National Moving Month, and National Water Safety Month. Could you celebrate all of this simultaneously by chowing down on a burger while riding a bike into a golf course water hazard…and then moving on, fast? Perhaps. But while you’re planning your burger-fueled escapade, why not catch up with what’s going on in…
There are only a few ways to make more money in business. The first is to sell more of the things that you have to sell. Instead of selling ten widgets, you sell twenty. Instead of turning over your inventory twice a season you do it three times a season. If your costs stay the same and you’re selling more of your product at the same price, you’ll make more money. The second is to cut the costs of what you sell. If you can squeeze more profit out of the same product and maintain your sales volume, you’ll make…
One of the most important decisions that any business owner can make is often almost one of the most difficult: the name of the business. Unlike most decisions a business owner makes, this is one that can’t be easily undone and one that cannot be easily fixed should it turn out less than well. Getting the name of the business right is so important that it barely matters how wrong a business gets their name because being even a little off the mark in a competitive, global economy means missing out on the sales and customers that are needed to…
Welcome to the week! Silicon Valley is back. No, not the tech sector which never went anywhere as far as I know but the hit TV series. Last night the gang from Pied Piper returned to screens to take another deep dive into the culture of the startup world on the west coast. Most anyone working in technology will recognize the characters, the tropes, and the spot-on parodies of everything from corporate leadership to product development and fundraising. If you’re a fan, then last night’s episode will be this morning’s water cooler topic du jour. And if you’ve never seen…
All this week on The DOZ Blog we are taking a close look at event marketing around Earth Day. Over the last couple of days we’ve looked at Earth Day, its origins, and helped readers understand the event before they get started marketing around it. We’ve also presented one of the most successful campaigns centered on Earth Day from the Smithsonian and demonstrated how sometimes creativity can really pay off. In today’s post we take on the other side of Earth Day marketing in answer to the question: how does a company that is not normally associated with the environment…