Electric Marketing Blog

For 30 years the UK Government has pursued a policy of attracting inward investment. From the Nissan factory in Sunderland to the new owners of Land Rover (Indian car maker Tata Motors) and owners of Ribena and Lucozade (Japanese Suntory), overseas companies have invested heavily in UK manufacturing. In recent years House of Fraser has sold an 89% stake to Chinese conglomerate Sanpower before coming back under UK ownership, while high streets host overseas retailers Muji and Uniqlo (Japan), Zara and Mango (Spain) and H&M (Sweden). Wind back to the 1980s and the high street looked quite

Spot the odd one out: SW SE NW NE WC EC A young graduate was given the job of appointment setting for the marketing director who wanted to 'touch base with our London clients' and have a few lunches in Soho. The Cambridge graduate selects a list of London clients using these postcodes and gets down to making the phone calls. He makes four appointments and proudly hands the marketing director the lunching schedule. "Newcastle! Why am I spending Thursday afternoon in Newcastle!" yells the director. Rest of team sniggers; the trainee assumed that if London has postcodes for South West, North West

I have always accepted the industry standard that business-to-business data decays at a rate of 30% a year and good sceptic that I am, assumed that the data industry was talking this up to encourage repeat orders. Last week, we were pricing a list research project for a client and we happened to put this to the test. We took a data file from June 2013, ran the exact same search again, compared the two files and found that 50% of the records had changed. Whether this was companies moving offices, email address changes, new phone numbers and most often, people switching jobs, we found that over

It is not hard to find a business which has had a bad experience of buying an email list. And there are plenty of bloggers who preach building your own email list organically by getting people to sign up on your website. This is good eMarketing practice but building a sizeable list of clients, prospects and interested parties can take years. If you aren't sure whether buying an email list is right for your company, ask yourself if your business fits into any of these categories. Your business is a new start up with a handful of happy customers and you want to find more customers. Quickly. Your

The European Parliament has voted to adopt the less business-friendly version of the Data Protection Regulation, proposed by the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE) in the November 2013 report.

The European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers have now all drafted different versions of the proposed data protection regulation. Europe's Justice and Home Affairs ministers failed to reach an agreement on the draft legislation at their Council meeting in December 2013. The Greek government has taken the chair of the Presidency of the EU Council and hopes to thrash out an agreement on the wording of the new legislation by summer 2014. If this happens it is possible that the new regulations could be agreed in 2014 and become law in 2017. What impact will these

We wrote to a variety of MEPs, MPs, government ministers, other politicians and business organisations. Here are summaries of their responses: Charles Tannock MEP, Conservative - no response yet Claude Moraes MEP, Labour - no response yet Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP, Liberal Democrat - I am seeking to create an instrument with standards that are workable, realistic and enforceable by being user-friendly for citizens, allowing reasonable business to proceed, focused on outcomes rather than on process and tick-box exercise, and tough in sanctions on companies which practise deception or otherwise

You may have heard that the European Union is planning sweeping changes to data protection laws. What you may not have realised is the impact these changes will have on your business. As the proposals currently stand it will become illegal to send a mailshot send a promotional email make a telemarketing call to any named individual either at home or at work without first obtaining their explicit consent. Quite simply it will mean the end of targeted direct marketing in the UK. These proposals are probably well intentioned. It is likely that tougher data protection laws would protect vulnerable