One user posted “I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women.”

But unfortunately manufacturers don’t quite see the funny side and were quoted on the BBC saying “Not everyone can start out at the top and not everyone from our neck of the woods lives in a trailer or cruises Walmart to hook up.”

Quite… But not everyone has a Three Wolf Moon T-shirt!

Improve your life

This is great example of a successful (although involuntary) seeding and viral campaign. Neoco help brands do this all the time to great effect. Look at the brand, product or service that needs promoting, then identify a niche that we can use to amplify the message.

Thanks to BBC

Waterstones have been over-charging on their books. Naughty

The common assumption is that almost everything is cheaper online. Lower staffing and ‘bricks and mortar’ costs means savings made can be passed on to the consumer via deals and discounted RRP. There is no doubt that one of the biggest beneficiaries of this in recent years has been the Book industry. Since Amazon lead the charge, books have never been so popular. And this seems to be something that Waterstones has been using to it’s advantage as a recent report from The Bookseller shows Waterstones selling books online at a higher price point than the RRP.

Check out internet Retailing article here

This brings up another important online factor – laziness. People have become very lazy shoppers online, almost total creatures of habit. The assumption is that they are getting a good deal and so they go with what’s in front of them. This is massive business on portals like Ebay – a friend of mine makes about £20,000 profit annually buying stuff from traditional websites – like PC world, Amazon – and then selling for a mark-up on Ebay. And it sells. People cannot even be bothered to price check when it would take a few minutes.

Waterstones will likely lose some customers now but it shows the value of a brand that people trust – they won’t look elsewhere. If you want to help build a trusted brand online (and not rip off consumers) then get in touch with us at Neoco. We have a wealth of experience communicating brand messaging and communications to the right audience in the right way – from traditional online methods to emerging ones like social networks.

amazon trade-in grab

In these budget-minded times, companies aplenty have begun offering cash or trade-ins in exchange for unwanted electronics, gift cards and gold. Now, from none other than Amazon, comes a program to offer gift cards in exchange for second-hand video games.

To be eligible, games must be in good condition and include the original manual, cover art and case. Amazon’s Video Game Trade-In site lists a wide variety of games it will accept, along with their trade-in values. For Wii, for example, “Marvel Ultimate Alliance” is valued at USD 6, “Winter Sports the Ultimate Challenge” brings in USD 6.50 and “Super Paper Mario” is valued at USD 15.50. On Xbox 360, on the other hand, “Call of Duty: World at War” brings in USD 24.25. For shipments valued at USD 10 or more, Amazon even gives consumers a way to ship them for free. Upon receipt, Amazon deposits an Amazon.com Gift Card into the consumer’s account. The games, meanwhile, are ultimately purchased by a third-party merchant. While trade-in prices might not be as high as a seller can get on eBay, there’s no denying that Amazon’s service is the more convenient option.

Until economic conditions begin to improve, consumers will continue to seek out recession-busting strategies to make their hard-won dollars, euros and yen go further. Help them do that, and you just may be able to do some recession-busting yourself!

Interesting to see how this impacts ebay and the other high street retailers like Game, HMV, Blockbuster and CEX.

RB @Springwise

monty python you tube channel banner

“We’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.”

And you know what? It seems to be working. Monty Python’s DVDs climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent!

Great marketing ploy to get one last silly walk from the dead parrot.
Enjoy.

virtual window shopping at Amazon

The saying is that everything comes full circle, eventually. Fitting then that Amazon, the company that effectively killed the idea of window shopping (or took it to the nth level depending on your viewpoint) have released a new beta site called Windowshop.

Use your arrow keys to pick a genre, and then space bar to zoom in and watch the video content. It’s fun, well made but ultimately just a gimmick. A nice add on might have been a hook up with your amazon account, add to wishlist, etc. Still time for these add-ons though as it is a beta, though one wonders if it will ever leave beta or is it just a nice little bit of PR?

Borders has gone solo, after its 7 year web sales tie in with Amazon. David Runk of the AP announced that Borders has returned to being an independent online bookstore, with a major facelift designed to increase interest in its brand.

I’ve had a look around the site, borders.com, and think its a really cool and easy to use site. The storefront has rich visuals, with ‘The Magic Shelf’ centrepiece – a browser window that users can interact with to view highlighted books, music, and movies. Users can operate this menu several ways. If you choose on option from the lefthand menu, it will take you to your desired shelf. You can then toggle the arrows at the edges of the window to see all new and/or recommended picks. Or you can simply grab the window and drag your way about the shelves. Whichever way, its great to be given the choice of how you want to browse.
Borders claim that it is refreshing its online storefront not just to compete combating with the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but also to create a more interactive experience for its customers, with author-contributed shortlists, interviews, and other content. Borders also states that, even with the launch of its new website, it remains open to a sale of the business. According to the AP, Borders announced some two months ago that it might put itself up for sale, and that Barnes & Noble very recently “confirmed it put together a team to study the feasibility of a deal.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgQMTLKmwrA]

Not quite as slick as the IKEA sequence from the movie Fight Club but it shows we’re getting there. Overlay.tv is a new start-up with a great infomercial viral movie (see below), that enables users to overlay content on top of video. This content can be just for fun and games or it can actually link to other pages – ideal for one-click purchase of some shoes in the new Sex and the City film!

OK, so it’s a few steps from movies as currently it only enables video streams from popular video sharing sites like YouTube, MySpace TV, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, and College Humor but that’s pretty impressive to start with (although similar to Ooyala).

Nice, but what about the retailers? Well, they’ve already signed up over 600 including Amazon, iTunes and Wal-Mart. Add in the fact it works in both IE and FireFox (sorry no Safari, Apple peeps) and that users can even turn off overlays means this is one exciting piece of tech. If only it was running on the M&S site that we mentioned a few days ago…