Although two-thirds of consumers (66 percent) say they participate in loyalty programs because of the discounts, redemption patterns say otherwise, according to a Maritz Poll commissioned by St. Louis, Missouri-based Maritz Loyalty Marketing. The survey found that when it’s time to select their awards , most members redeem points for gift certificates.
stated preferences and their actual behavior in loyalty and rewards programs do not always match,” says Gail Sneed, director, market development for Maritz Loyalty Marketing. “It’s critical for companies to avoid making assumptions about their target audience’s preferences and desires, and rather employ a strategic approach to truly understand customer behavior. Otherwise, programs could fail to accomplish their intended goals.”

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Popularity: 47%

Accor Hotels are having an online sale of just $1 per room per night for stays around New Zealand throughout May - July 2008. You can register for email alerts as each destination goes on sale, then jump onto accorhotels.co.nz and make the most of the sale. There are only 100 rooms available for $1 in each destination so don’t miss out. Plus there’s a Queenstown break for two to be won. I’m planning my trip right now!

Popularity: 15%

1. Advertising must be an extension of a good marketing communication strategy. If it differs from the other components of the strategy, then is not meeting the goals of the strategy and perhaps creating unintended results or messages. Therefore, when you create advertisements you should try to keep the message consistent with the message of the marcom strategy.

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Popularity: 14%

Media tracking firm SQAD is set to unveil a new tool that brings benchmarking methods for TV and radio ad costs to the online world, reports Mediaweek.WebCosts will allow online media buyers to draw on historical data to determine what a placement should cost. That would add much needed transparency to the online ad world, which suffers from a major lack thereof.Reports will reflect average CPM based on the site, format, time of day and other data.WebCosts will be unveiled by SQAD at the upcoming 4As industry conference, following a year in closed testing by 14 agencies.

Popularity: 5%

MySpace. The year 2007 was the worst year for MySpace. Media rave, honors, and criticism were received by Facebook. Everyone kind of forget that MySpace has almost 3 times more visitors than Facebook (57 million unique visitors in November vs. 22 million Facebook visitors). In December, on the USA Today pages were announced that MySpace will renovate design and features. Email, weather, news, easy photo and video share are products which developers promise their visitors in upcoming year.

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Popularity: 5%