We got a brand new crystal ball as an early Christmas present. Not one of those rubbish ones from ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, which just shows flying monkeys and melty witches. Nope, our one’s much more useful, because it allows us to peek behind the curtain and see what’s in store in the world of marketing, retail and our own particular field of expertise: advocacy.
It’s a big month for us, as L’Oréal – the world’s largest cosmetics company – launches a new customer acquisition programme using the Buyapowa platform. We’ll be helping some of their best-loved brands to bring peer-to-peer selling – a cosmetics industry tactic ever since Victorian times – beautifully up to date.
Well as parties go, this year’s Black Friday weekend was ‘one huge sales party’!
We are not going to bore you by repeating all the stats about how many billion dollars of sales were made, how many million parcels need to be delivered or what was the average response time for the Argos or Target website. Let’s suffice it to say that US$4.4bn spent online in the US and £1.1bn spent online in the UK is a big party in anyone’s vocabulary.
After a difficult decade for the global magazine industry, beset by competition from abundant free content online and peer to peer sharing of copyrighted information, 2015 was predicted to be the year that digital revenue gains finally outweighed falling print revenue. So it is encouraging to see the UK, with its long and illustrious history of printed magazines and pamphlets, leading the way in adopting innovative solutions to drive subscriptions growth across print and digital, as seen in the recent PPA ABC Consumer Magazines Report in August 2015.
If there was an area of marketing ripe for innovation it had to be sampling!
If you have any doubts, then the next time a smiley young person presses a face cream pack or International SIM card into your hand, just check the mountain of discarded packets round the corner.
If you have been following the business pages lately you cannot help being struck by the huge changes underfoot in the online gaming industry with mega-mergers between Betfair and PaddyPower and GVC beating 888 Holdings to acquire Betwin.
These gaming behemoths have sought scale as a response to spiralling customer acquisition costs, as well as increased tax and regulatory burdens. A profitable customer can often cost hundreds of dollars to acquire. It is refreshing to see a leading online gaming business like Welton Holdings’ Fun88 take an innovative approach to reducing customer acquisition costs.
