Marketing

Building a community around a brand is an important and often-overlooked part of being successful in e-commerce. "Community solidifies the relationship between your brand and your customer," said e-commerce consultant Ian Rhodes. "It creates loyalty. Whilst the majority of retail brands are seeking ...

Facebook reportedly has developed a new advertising service designed to predict the future behavior of consumers. The service uses FBLearner Flow, an artificial intelligence prediction engine the company introduced in 2016. The technology enables companies to target people based on decisions they ha...

A solid brand is key to business success, but over the years I have seen many companies try to commit suicide by killing the brand identities they spent so many years and so much money creating. Many are now gone. Others are still around, but in a weakened position. You must give the customer a comp...

Customers often make investments in their relationships with the businesses they choose to patronize. There is plenty of competition, so companies must pay attention to this. It's only when a company respects and wants a customer as much as the customer wants the company that things will go well, an...

Google Pay launched last week, becoming the latest entry in the world of master-brand confusion. The new Google Pay combines features of Android Pay and Google Wallet, brands that each had different brand relationships with customers. That means the master brand message, which should be simple and c...

Google's Chrome Web browser has begun blocking some of the Net's most annoying types of ads. Chrome's built-in ad filter blocks ads based on standards devised by the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group whose membership roster includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Unilev...

User engagement with podcasts has been steadily increasing, and many listeners actually prefer longer-format content based on the results of Apple's Podcast Analytics.

Google on Thursday announced a new feature that will let users mute so-called "reminder ads" in third-party apps and websites that are powered by its ad engine. It plans to expand this feature to its own services, including Gmail, YouTube, and Google Search, in the coming months.

Google has built a new marketing model around "micro-moments." Many other companies are following suit. "You have to make that conversion happen right on the spot once customers have looked at your website or mobile app," said Bret Bonnet, president of Quality Logo Products.

Verizon is finally snapping out of the doldrums it has been stuck in for the last several years. It seems to be on a comeback trail, thanks to its new advertising campaign. Having followed the company for decades, I've noticed how all of a sudden, it is blowing its own horn again. This is what it sh...

Moves that allowed major e-commerce players to jockey for position both off and on the Internet made headlines in 2017. "The year was a triumph for market leaders," said Mike Comstock, a senior adviser at GrandCanals. "Leading companies like Amazon, Target and Walmart just got stronger, as they have...

One thing the latest holiday sales season made crystal clear is that mobile commerce is on the rise. On Cyber Monday -- which set an all-time-high overall sales record of $6.6 billion -- mobile shopping totaled 47.4 percent of visits to retailers' websites, according to Adobe. However, etailers coul...

B2B ad spending will increase 13 percent in 2018 to hit $4.6 billion from this year's estimated $4.07 billion, eMarketer has predicted. However, its proportion of all U.S. digital ad spending will remain unchanged at 4.9 percent, which implies growth in other digital ad spend areas as well. Desktops...

Sixty percent of the digital marketing professionals who responded to a recent survey reported difficulty in reaching their target audiences with messaging and content. Only 19 percent of those surveyed were "very familiar" with how automation could help drive marketing campaigns, according to the r...