Blue Monday, fact, fiction or purely a marketing opportunity?

Today is supposed to be the gloomiest day of the year, according to Dr Cliff Arnall, a former academic specialised in the field of psychology that devised a formula that is supposed to determine the gloomiest day of the year based on some rather grim factors. Beyond the validity of Dr Arnall’s depression score formula, some opportunities arise from events like this from a marketing perspective, and businesses have embraced rather happily Blue Monday to their calendar of marketing communication activities and promotional events.

Call for participants – Improving presentation skills with simulations

Thank you for stopping by! We'd love to work with you to develop your communication skills and help us advance some research. What is this project about? We are researching the use of simulations to train and improve skills. This particular simulation focused on...

#HenleyDigital is now over – reflections and future directions for my digital marketing modules

For the second year, I had the opportunity to teach the Digital Marketing modules at Henley Business School at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I called the module #HenleyDigital, and some students have engaged with the hashtag on Twitter and...

UAE Inter-School Business Challenge 2016 was a big success!

For the second time I was part of the organising team of the UAE Inter-School Business Challenge at Heriot-Watt University, Dubai Campus. On this edition the interest was even greater than the last year, with over 200 students, 40 teams and some of the most prominent...

The journey to successful content marketing in a highly cultural diverse setting: insights from Dubbizle in the UAE

A couple of weeks ago we had the pleasure to host Nadia Zehni, head of marketing at Dubbizle, the leading classified website in the UAE as part of the guest speakers invited to talk to our IMM students. Our Advances in Digital Marketing class had the opportunity to see how real organisations develop and implement their content marketing strategy, and to see that in fact the models that are taught in the lectures are implemented in marketing practice (you know all this set clear objectives, choose content types, measure results, etc.).

Attracting Website Visitors with SEO

Attracting a visitor to a website might mean using push media such as advertisements to attract website visitors the website or pull media in the form of high rank in search engine listing when the potential visitor will visit the website as part of their search...

How to find a good marketing dissertation topic (2021-2022 Edition)

Once again that time of the year when students across the world need to find a marketing dissertation topic is looming. I recently delivered a guest lecture at Henley Business School about the future of marketing, and many of the questions were related to finding good...

Mobile advertising in the MENA region: factors influencing users’ atttitudes

Mobile advertising is in an experimental phase in MENA region, where marketers are simply just “trying it out” and hold the attitude that the mobile “doesn’t work yet”

Social influence marketing: why do we let others influence our purchase decisions and how to leverage this in your business

In the current hyper-connected environment where companies and consumers interact, learning how to leverage social influence marketing techniques can be a source of competitive advantage for your business.

What does a sales intelligence analyst do?

Interview with Gianluca Di Chiara - Sales Intelligence Analyst @ Vodafone Italy. Transcript Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA  Thank you, Gianluca for agreeing to take part in the series of interviews where I'm interviewing marketers and digital marketers around the globe that I met...

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The UK General Election: can social media covfefe influence the elections?

The UK General Election: can social media covfefe influence the elections?

Social media was, without a doubt, at the centre of all candidates’ campaign strategy in this General Election. However, this was not always the case. The Obama campaign popularised the use of social media for political reasons in 2008. Before that, ‘respectable’ politicians tended to shy away from this channel. The reasons are similar to the one’s brands experienced in the early stages of social media adoption: it is hard to control what happens once a tweet or Facebook post is out, and politicians (as well as brands) were not very keen on criticism on these public platforms. However, the attitudes towards social media by politicians worldwide is more welcoming today than ten years ago, and many of the most prominent personalities in the global political sphere have a prolific social media presence and covfefe. However, is it a positive thing?

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Blue Monday, fact, fiction or purely a marketing opportunity?

Blue Monday, fact, fiction or purely a marketing opportunity?

Today is supposed to be the gloomiest day of the year, according to Dr Cliff Arnall, a former academic specialised in the field of psychology that devised a formula that is supposed to determine the gloomiest day of the year based on some rather grim factors. Beyond the validity of Dr Arnall’s depression score formula, some opportunities arise from events like this from a marketing perspective, and businesses have embraced rather happily Blue Monday to their calendar of marketing communication activities and promotional events.

read more
Uncovering online brand communities

Uncovering online brand communities

Online brand communities (OBCs) have increasingly gathered the attention of marketers as they can generate several positive outcomes for brands. An online brand community is a specialised group of people that gathers in online environments with a shared interest (usually a brand, a brand category, or a particular web page). These online communities become a space where consumers share ideas, feelings and opinions about a product or a brand. In this article, we will examine this phenomenon from an SME perspective as we believe that understanding how these communities work can also be beneficial for small businesses.

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Europe’s largest technology market place is around the corner: 7000+ UK tech and business leaders to descend on Lisbon

Europe’s largest technology market place is around the corner: 7000+ UK tech and business leaders to descend on Lisbon

Web Summit is a global technology conference hosted annually in Lisbon. In 2016, more than 50,000 attendees from over 165 countries will fly to Lisbon for Web Summit, including over 20,000 companies, 7,000 CEOs and 2,000 international journalists. Speakers will include the founders and CEOs of the world’s largest tech companies as well as political leaders and major sports, fashion and music personalities.

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Performance marketing: is your agency ticking the right boxes?

Performance marketing: is your agency ticking the right boxes?

Performance marketing in the UAE is like the latest Lamborghini: everybody wants it, many people talk about it, but at the end, it is very rare to see it in action. No matter if we are speaking about Google AdWords or Facebook Advertising, most advertisers are using soft or no metrics when it comes to analysing their campaigns. They are satisfied with “something is happening” but they do not really care whether they are getting some returns on their investment or not.

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Analysing the effects on reputation, credibility and trust of three PR strategies to manage a crisis on Facebook

Analysing the effects on reputation, credibility and trust of three PR strategies to manage a crisis on Facebook

Social media platforms are now a common tool for PR practitioners to manage a crisis. When used correctly, social media allow organisations to monitor the sentiment of people towards a specific situation and to correct rumours rapidly before they become facts. However, what is the tone and best strategy that PR departments should adopt when a crisis happens?

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Social Media Summit 2016: social influence marketing on the rise

Social Media Summit 2016: social influence marketing on the rise

I was invited to give a talk on Facebook fan page engagement at the Social Media Summit in Dubai. This was based on part of the research that I have done for my PhD and some other new research avenues that I am currently investigating. What was interesting from this event, was how much relevance social influence marketing is having among marketing practitioners.

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A guide to social influence marketing in online environments

A guide to social influence marketing in online environments

Social influence marketing employs social psychology principles to achieve marketing and business goals. It draws on the fact that as potential customers make a purchasing decision, they are being influenced by various forces. Within the field of social psychology, the concept of ‘social influence’ and its effect on individual behaviour, attitudes and beliefs is widely studied. Social influence has also of interest to marketers as consumer-to-consumer interactions are believed to affect consumer behaviour, attitudes, and feelings towards a product or brand. Trends towards brands being present in online environments, plus the innate human need to anthropomorphise objects to facilitate interactions with non-material objects make brand-consumer interactions within social media subject to similar effects.

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Engagement behaviours on Facebook Fan pages

Engagement behaviours on Facebook Fan pages

Facebook offers companies several options to contact and communicate with their customers. Four behaviours are possible for a Facebook brand page user. Users can decide to look into a page of a brand and “Like” the page, which will lead to being able to see further messages from the brand later in his Facebook newsfeed. Furthermore, once that content is displayed, the platform allows users to “react” to the content, leave a comment on the content, and share the content with others. This post examines more in detail all these engagement behaviours.

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Building customer relationships one tweet at a time

Building customer relationships one tweet at a time

The landscape of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has shifted markedly in recent years, fuelled, by amongst other things, developments in technology and the rapid expansion of social media platforms. Social media use among Internet users and businesses is now widespread. From an SME perspective, companies have looked at social media channels as a cost-effective marketing tool, and consequently many organisations, big and small, have jumped onto the social media bandwagon over the last decade. True, early social media platforms allowed businesses to market directly to their potential and current customers at almost zero financial cost, however with a push towards monetisation and changes in the algorithms in many of the mainstream platforms is making this channel a more pay-to-play one. We propose that looking at social media not only as a marketing tool but also as a space where companies and customers can build meaningful relationship is the way forward.

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#STEP2016 Reached over 22M users on Twitter

#STEP2016 Reached over 22M users on Twitter

One of the most important conferences for start-ups in the MENA region took place this week: STEP 2016. The second edition of what it is very likely to become the hippest start-up gathering in the region had a combination of big players in the region (“the unicorns”) and very enthusiastic entrepreneurs that are looking to become the next big thing. The conference had also a very interesting line up of speakers from the region and beyond.

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The journey to successful content marketing in a highly cultural diverse setting: insights from Dubbizle in the UAE

The journey to successful content marketing in a highly cultural diverse setting: insights from Dubbizle in the UAE

A couple of weeks ago we had the pleasure to host Nadia Zehni, head of marketing at Dubbizle, the leading classified website in the UAE as part of the guest speakers invited to talk to our IMM students. Our Advances in Digital Marketing class had the opportunity to see how real organisations develop and implement their content marketing strategy, and to see that in fact the models that are taught in the lectures are implemented in marketing practice (you know all this set clear objectives, choose content types, measure results, etc.).

read more
Consumer engagement as a key performance metric in social media

Consumer engagement as a key performance metric in social media

The concept of consumer engagement is used in advertising and among marketing practitioners, ranking consumer engagement as one of the top priorities of online marketing activities. Among the reasons behind this interest are that consumer engagement is associated with consumer trust, satisfaction and loyalty and commitment, all of them strong indicators of long-term sales, word-of-mouth and brand advocacy.

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