Am I alone in totally disagreeing with Google’s policy of allowing companies to bid on competitors brand names? As a professional marketer I have a problem with this. To me it’s almost marketing piracy. And as a consumer I am now getting increasingly annoyed that when I google something very specific , most of the [...]

There are some strange job titles around, but I think I’ve just seen the craziest and it comes from an ad agency. Lorna Hawtin of TBWA Manchester is Disruption Director.

Web-based footwear retailer Zappos may now be owned by Amazon, but it has an amzing reputation for its customer service and now turns over more than$1billion. It’s 10 core values start with ‘Create WOW through service’. But do you know what I really like? After new employees have completed their initial training they are offered $2,000 to resign.

Am I the only person who is horrified by the recent ads from Royal Mail, promoting their new ‘Insight Tool’? This tool gives access to 140 million eBay transactions ‘telling you who’s buying what at postcode level’ . Where is the indiviudal’s right to privacy in this? The data may be aggregated at postcode level [...]

At what point does clever marketing become marketing that is totally misleading, and which makes the customer believe they are buying something they aren’t? I know that under English law we have caveat emptor i.e. buy beware, meaning that the customer should check that what they are getting is what they have been led to [...]

I read with interest in a recent issue of Marketing magazine that sales of Budweiser lager have fallen by 32% between 2004 and 2008, so that it is now the 8th best-selling lager in the UK rather than the 5th best-selling. It made me think back to Louis the frog (he was the meerkat of [...]