Thank you to all of Software Labs' staff who chose to take part, the money raised will make a big difference to our local community.

Many businesses are not focused on getting feedback because their priorities lie elsewhere. Richard Hill, planning director at advertising agency Touch DDB, says: "The growth of the business through volume of new customers and cross-selling to existing customers is often the key focus. This means that at their core, businesses are not motivated to deal with customer retention.

Loss-leading offers, a typical example would be the battle for telecoms and broadband. Acquisition-driven businesses, which largely put a disproportionate amount of effort into bringing new customers in with loss-leading offers, cannot then afford to offer adequate fulfillment and support to customers once they arrive."

As it is much harder to get a new customer than to keep an existing one, if talking to customers increases loyalty, it must be worthwhile. The list of top brands in the Marketing Week and BrandIndex, Best Brand Performers 2008, which was published in May, suggests that good customer contact increases consumer loyalty, with Amazon and Google - relatively new brands that strive to find better ways to meet customer needs - taking the top slots. Mike Welsh, CEO if direct marketing agency Craik Jones Watson Mitchell Voelkel, believes that inviting feedback is crucial in order to do this, as brands that are serious about feedback are those that deliberately make it easy to give in.

marketingweek.co.uk

Writing on the business website, he added that companies should not class advertising as marketing.  "Don't think that because you're advertising, you're marketing. There are more than 200 forms of marketing," he wrote.

"Advertising is one of them. If you're advertising, you're advertising. You're doing only one half of one per cent of what you can do."

Recent research by Millward Brown found that many businesses would choose to cut other expenditure on many other promotional techniques before reducing spend on digital and new media marketing.

The study, which was carried out for PRWeek and Manning Selvage & Lee, found that the mediums most likely to be cut were point of sale marketing and advertising.

Business Strata

'Carter thought it was a good idea to have Brown call people personally' Daily Mail's source says. 'Stephen will choose a letter or email at random, have one of his team at Number 10 prepare a response, then get Brown to call'

Unfortunately, one of the first calls backfired. 'Brown made a phone call at 6am, without thinking. Luckily the person he called was a shift worker, so he was awake'

Daily Mail

If the Prime Minister is trying Software Labs to raise his profile, perhaps you should too!  

The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 aim to protect consumers against unfair, misleading or aggressive marketing practices. Imitating a consumer to promote a business will become a criminal offence; the laws ban any commercial practices that fail to make a trader’s commercial intent clear.

Offences that can be punished by up to two years in prison will include faking credentials, such as displaying a trustmark without authority. There is also a ban on running a ‘closing down sale’ when the trader is not closing down.

There are further restrictions on the use of the word ‘free’. Describing a product as free is banned when the consumer will have to pay “anything other than the unavoidable cost of responding, collecting or paying for delivery of the item”.

Precision Marketing