Q&As

WrestleMania 21 has been sold out for months, but World Wrestling Entertainment is spending more than $5 million with a multi-media campaign to promote Pay-Per-View purchases of the annual live event next month. Pizza boxes tell consumers about …

The Atlanta Braves and their Turner Broadcasting sibling Cartoon Network are joining forces in creating a branded entertainment and dining experience for kids and families at its home ballpark, Turner Field. An artist’s rendering of Tooner Field The …

Desperate to win a contest? ABC is inviting fans of its hit comedy Desperate Housewives to enter an online quiz and sweeps, offering a grand-prize trip to attend the show’s DVD launch party in Los Angeles. Desperate fans seeking to win a prize can …

Marketing to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community isn’t as difficult as quantifying the market. That was one conclusion you could draw from the Reaching Out conference held in February by students at Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Yale School of Management.

During Meeting Professionals International’s ROI Summit last July, Tracey Smith, manager, events programming, at Thomson RIA, a Dallas-based software company, had to duck out of a session to take part in a conference call with her vice presidents of sales, marketing, customer operations, and product development. They wanted to talk about an upcoming user conference that she was planning, and about how to measure the return on investment for their attendees.

Direct marketers put a huge amount of time and money into examining, testing, analyzing, and fine-tuning their marketing on a campaign-by-campaign basis. The results of a single campaign are judged by response rates, average spend amounts, and often, the ROI generated by that campaign.

While merchants and their customers believe that superior customer service is extremely important, the two differ on the most important customer service elements, according to a new national survey conducted by the NRF Foundation, an arm of the National Retail Federation, and the American Express Co.

According to CATALOG AGE’s Benchmark Report on Operations, which will appear in the April issue, a mean 35.5% of catalogers’ orders come via the Web. So it stands to reason that Internet buyers account for a growing share of catalogers’ print circulation

Having an emotional bond gives a marketer a license to go places with a consumer they wouldn’t be welcome otherwise. As an example of this, Bob Wallach, senior vice president of marketing, refrigerated division, ConAgra Foods, cited the Walt Disney Company. Disney used the warm feelings the public had for its characters to make the leap from movies to theme parks to a myriad of other opportunities like cruise ships.

Meeting the consumer’s current needs isn’t enough to guarantee success. According to Forrester Research, a marketer must also anticipate future needs. In a recently released report, Forrester analyst Christine Spivey Overby dubs this proactive approach “consumer-focused innovation” and outlines its three basic principles