Moms: have you "picked a date" to sit down with your eight year-old daughter and discuss menstruation? What are you waiting for? "A study published in Pediatrics last year found that in the United States, 15 percent of American girls begin puberty by age 7." The Kotex corporation "has you covered," ha. Andrew Adam Newman reports:
Remember to include the Unilever corporation on your Christmas card list this year, ladies: without their groundbreaking research, you wouldn't know enough to be publicly concerned about the hideousness of your armpit region.
Hair Club for Men—now called simply "Hair Club" in order to communicate to ladies that yes, you ladies are welcome here too, come right in—has made a strategic decision to turn the vast resources of its sly marketing machine (which created "I'm Also a Client") on a new hairless demographic: bikers (the motorcycle kind). This probably makes sense somehow.
"Neuromarketing" is a term coined by the advertising industry because it sounds nice and not at all scary or ominous. Then again, it might be total pseudoscientific crapola! Who's to say? The advertising industry, that's who!
A few days ago, the Internet freaked out over a viral video of a guy who hacked Times Square video screens with a live feed from an iPhone. It was a fake viral marketing stunt for the new movie Limitless. But now a guy has done it for real—sort of. Adi Isakovic, a 27-year-old entrepreneur, tested out his new product, TubeMote, and used it to broadcast a video of his dog on a Times Square Jumbotron.
Across America, millions upon millions of despondent mothers (3.9 million, specifically!) have started blogs to share their feelings of anomie, their existential despair at the trap that their lives have become, and cleaning tips. Many of them aspire to one day be used as a small cog in a vast corporate marketing machine. They work cheap!
Whether you're a child, an adult desperately trying to cling to the bygone symbols of childhood, or simply have a poorly developed palate, the fact is, you love Cap'n Crunch™ brand breakfast cereal, despite all of the good reasons not too. Well, good news, corn syrup fetishists: contrary to published reports, your beloved cartoon-clad corn byproduct nuggets are not disappearing.
From Mad Men to guerilla and social marketing, here is an animated short by the marketing firm Cake Group that will bring you up to speed on the history of marketing.
Porn 'n t-shirt purveyor American Apparel has been in serious financial trouble for months now. Its clearest path to rescue was to find an outside investor—but conventional wisdom said that that would only happen if crazy CEO Dov Charney gave up some control. Dov objected to that idea! But now he's apparently seen the light.
Do you know how sometimes you go to buy a pack of gum or some spoons or a pack of washcloths and the person at the register demands that you tell them your ZIP code, in order to be granted the right to hand over money for your purchase? And you're like "Buh? That is so exploitative. Well whatever, I really need these spoons." Yes, well, last week that practice was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court of California. And already, "More than a dozen new lawsuits have been filed against major chains that do business in California, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Bed Bath & Beyond Inc., Crate & Barrel and Victoria's Secret" over their ZIP Code-asking ways.
