There’s guerrilla marketing, buzz marketing and word-of-mouth marketing, then there’s just plain deception marketing.  My coworker, Wes, tipped me to this little diddy about suspicious sudden interest in Halloween masks of the Burger King mascot. Not that the character isn’t creepy enough to make a good halloween mask, mind you.  […]

What are the six products singled out by by The Center for Science in the Public Interest for having misleading food labels? Gerber Graduates for Toddlers Fruit Juice Snacks Betty Crocker Super Moist Carrot Cake Mix Smucker’s Simply 100% Fruit Spread Kellogg’s Eggo Nutri-Grain Pancakes General Mills’ Yoplait Light Fat […]

This is an interesting study – customers of McDonald’s and Subway were interviewed on their way out of the respective restaurants and asked how many calories they thought they had consumed.  Those data were then compared with how many they actually consumed. The results of the Cornell University and University […]

According to this article in USA Today, Starbucks is planning to run a religious quote on its cups in 2006 as part of a campaign designed “to carry on the coffeehouse tradition of conversation and debate.”  What I was prepared to write about is how absurd it seemed to me […]

CNN.com has an interesting special report called Online Evolution. Particularly interesting is a summary of online data collected from various sources.  I can’t link directly to it, but you can see it by clicking the “Tracking life online” link in the “How Has The Internet Changed?” section.  And, in case […]

I think it was the addition of 3000 podcasts to iTunes that finally put me over the edge.  With limited non-working, non-sleeping, non-parenting and non-husbanding hours in the day, there is now way too much media available.  In addition to 3000 podcasts (plus all the others not available through iTunes) […]

Here is an interesting look at current trends in logos.  For fun, you can also test your logo knowledge with the four versions of the Retail Alphabet Game.

In a recent paper, marketing professors from Wharton and Boston College looked at the positive response consumers have to imaginative names, even if they are not particularly descriptive.  Very interesting! via [Seth’s Blog]

Calling it ‘Project XYZ,’ Forbes reports that Starwood Hotels & Resorts plans to launch “a new line of lower-priced hotels based on its upscale W Hotel chain…”  Luxist likens the “cheaper but still cool” idea to brands such as Target, Mini Cooper and JetBlue. For anyone who has stayed at […]

Many of you may already know about this, but I just recently discovered Answers.com by clicking the “definition” link in the upper right of Google’s results page.  This is a beautifully simple site that provides what they call “snapshots” of information on over a million words, topics, etc.  On one […]