opinion piece

Foursquare: Reserved for the Mayor

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Lately, it seems that Foursquare’s popularity has somewhat decreased. This could be due to the lack of check-in ‘rewards’ and Facebook users who opt for the convenience of check-ins via the site.

One American business that’s been a bit more creative with its Foursquare incentives, is Talia’s Tuscan Table in Florida. The restaurant offers its customers a table reservation and permanent car parking space to whoever is Mayor. Not a bad perk!

I’m sure a lot of brands and businesses currently on Foursquare could be a bit more original and entice new and existing Foursquare users with a great incentive like the one mentioned above.

What would you offer if it was your business….?

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5934198/this-is-the-best-foursquare-perk-to-date

Valentine’s Day… Where did it all begin?

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For the cynical among us, Valentine’s Day is yet another excuse to be sold to. Cards, flowers, chocolates, expensive dinners and hours spent deliberating whether to buy a present or risk spending the night on the sofa… Surely this was all a marketing man’s dream and set up for us to fail?

It would seem not so. Here at Bullet, we took a little look into the history of 14th February.

There are at least three saints with the name Valentine – the most famous being a Christian priest who lived in Rome in the third century. Given that be seems to have been imprisoned, beaten with clubs and eventually beheaded on the orders of the Emperor Claudius II, all for being a Christian: it doesn’t bode well for the story of the saint of love.

But his execution coincided with the pagan festival of Lupercalia, dedicated to Juno, the goddess of women and fertility. To celebrate the festival, boys were encouraged to draw from a jar the names of girls written on slips of paper. After Pope Gelasius set aside the day to honour St Valentine in 496, the saint gradually became adopted as the patron saint of lovers.

It was some years later when Valentine’s Day became more mainstream. Rather than a card manufacturer coin the practice of sending cards, it is thought that the first man to send a Valentine note was a Frenchman. Charles, Duke of Orleans, was imprisoned in the Tower of London after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. During his 25 year imprisonment he wrote 60 love poems addressed to his wife, which are claimed as the first formal “valentines”. One even refers to her as “Ma tres doulce Valentinée”.

In the 1840s, a young American woman, Esther Howland (1828-1904), received an English Valentine and decided to introduce the tradition to the United States. She produced cards carrying messages like “Weddings now are all the go, Will you marry me or no”.
More than a century later a billion cards are sent each year worldwide.

Tracey O’Connor – Bullet

With credits to fact-finders Molly Oldfield and John Mitchinson

Life’s not a beauty contest… Oh wait, it is.

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Funny old game dating. Being recently single again after a long time out of the fray finds me contemplating the prospect with a mix of idle curiosity and dread (in roughly equally measures). In one of those strange ironies which fate delights in throwing into the mix now and then it struck me how similar the process is which leads to good, and sometimes not so good, partnership activity;

Marketers and agency bods in particular are essentially the dating agencies and matchmakers for brands who wish to get together, as their antennae tends to be (and certainly should be) more attuned to what’s happening in the wider marketplace. The net:net is that agencies should then be able to match personalities and motivations to ensure the best chance of success. This may be on a prescriptive basis i.e. as a direct instruction from a client “I want you to go out and find me some like minded brands” or on a more opportunistic and speculative basis, as in “There’s someone I think you should meet”.

Either way it’s important that both parties have a firm idea in mind as to what they are collectively prepared to both put into the venture – and also what their expectations are in terms of what they would like/need to take out? Get it right and it’s an interesting and fun thing to do, otherwise it’s destined to end in tears. With budgets stretched and hopes of an economic recovery any time soon looking about as likely as a TV talent contest with some actual talent, more and more brands are taking a closer look at partnership opportunities as part of the mix.

One of the first questions that prospective partners contemplating partnership marketing activity have to ask themselves is ‘what type of partner am I looking for’? And ultimately, even for longer term couplings, they probably eventually need to think about a suitable exit strategy when it starts to go stale.

Back to dating then – and if anyone finds a guitar-playing, single-malt drinking Helena Christensen lookalike (or Daisy Lowe), be sure to drop me a line won’t you…

Martin Barratt – Bullet

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