Shop in 3D

For the month of December, InStyle has gone 3-D.
Gifting in 3D features the first augmented reality ads offering a click-to-buy experience.  Each brand comes to life on screen through a customized, branded gift box that springs open to reveal a 30-second video, as the screen displays up to 10 items for gift-giving, including special offers and a chance to win a $1000 Shopping Spree in NYC.

The experience can also be shared virally. Expect to find deals, messages, and product suggestions from spectacular brands including: YSL, Neiman Marcus, Chanel, DVF, HP, and more.

Average Internet Speeds and Costs Around the World

The Blogger’s Bill of Rights

1. Anyone has the write to give their opinions about anything, for any reason. [i.e. They have the right to take pictures of their food, the right to be boring, the right to be wrong, and the right to rip their rivals.] They have, in short, a right to exist.

2. No blog or website should be read for one minute longer than it remains useful or entertaining.

3. Blogs should able to freely link to each other and quote to fair use standards, and to use each other’s images when credit and linkage is given.

4. Blogs are not responsible for the general rancor and malevolence of their commenters.

5. Blogs neither have to make money, nor be owned by a legitimate solvent entity, nor hew to any established standards of print journalism. They don’t have to be “interesting.” They don’t have to be “relevant.” They don’t have to appeal to anyone but their makers. And in that lay their special virtue. NO BLOG IS EXTRANEOUS.

Simple Luxury

Hangman Clothing Rack by Surya Graf

New from designer Surya Graf and Snack On, The Hangman Clothing Rack, first inspired by the materials and industrial finish of mass produced wire coat hangers. "Like the coat hanger, Hangman is constructed as one continuous line which bends around itself to create a visually dynamic and practical form."

Segmentation: Building Better Interactive Marketing By Reaching More Focused Markets

At the heart of successful marketing is the need to generalize: to make predictable the behaviors of large groups, and to extrapolate predictable trends from the jumbled mass of seemingly random individual actions. You must generalize your intelligence, tackling common sales trends rather than spending all your time chasing a multitude of independent prospect interests.

Your customers, however, do act individually with their own motivations, desires and needs. And when economic conditions get tight, your prospects individualize even further - they focus more on their unique problems and less on wider commercial trends. Their buying behavior segments. Businesses that overly focus on a single generalized market soon discover that financial problems arise fast when their customer base, previously marching in step, all start bolting off in their own directions. That poses a dilemma to many businesses when a recession hits.

No business can profitably afford to uniquely cater to every prospect on an individual basis. So how should you adapt your interactive marketing when their core market base - faced with the practical realities of a tough economy - begins to splinter and fragment?

Successful businesses segment their market. Targeted communications are crafted on a level closer to the lives of their customers. Rather than one big customer base, they segment their market into a group of smaller related customer bases - and in doing so, both serve their customers better and build a reliable redundancy into their sales cycle. As long as the economy remains in a recessionary or recovering position, smart businesses will segment their core markets with marketing strategies designed to appeal to smaller, more predictable prospect groups.

Consider how your core market can be approached as multiple segmented groups, each segment being:

Distinctive. Each targeted segment should be very clearly distinguishable from the others. What makes this group of people absolutely unique? What can you add to your online marketing to better identify with them, to distinguish their needs from other prospects?

Common. Prospects that make up each segment should share clear common qualities. Even in tough times, people never escape generalization altogether. What ties these prospects together? What can you add to your online portal to inspire a sense of community among them?

Responsive. Be brutally honest with yourself: is this group of people truly apt to respond to your marketing right now? Is your offering clearly within their current buying patterns? Don't waste time and money attempting to sell to a segment that clearly won't respond to you.

Reachable. A sharp message, selling a fabulous service to a responsive segment, accomplishes nothing if you can't actually reach those people. Interactive marketing - social networking, website design, email marketing - offers you more opportunities than ever before to reach your prospects. Start taking advantage of the tools available today to get your message out.

It is rarely good business to ever put all your eggs in one basket. But in a recessionary or recovering economy, it is often a guaranteed recipe for failure. If you're finding it harder and harder to boost your sales in this increasingly pragmatic sales landscape, stop: take a closer look at your prospects and consider how a segmentation plan can improve your marketing. You'll likely discover opportunities for success that you never dreamed were there - and the clear strategies you need to leverage them into greater future successes.

A Clear Win-Win: Preserve Brand AND Species

From the Lacoste crocodile to Charlie the Tuna, countless brands around the globe use animals and plants to personify and represent them. After years of profiting from those species' images, such companies and organizations can now help preserve and protect them through a new French effort called Save Your Logo.

Nearly one-quarter of the world's mammal species are threatened or extinct, as are roughly one-third of its amphibians and one in seven of its birds, according to the International Union for Nature Conservation (IUCN) Red List of 2008. Launched last fall, the Save Your Logo program lets companies and organizations that use the images of such species donate to the Endowment Fund for Biodiversity to help protect them. Each organization can donate up to EUR 1.5 million over three years to the fund, which is held by the World Bank, according to French press agency AFP; the World Bank will reportedly add up to 33 percent. Also behind the effort are the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) and the IUCN. Companies without plants or animals in their logos can participate as well by supporting 'unclaimed' species, Save Your Logo says. Either way, funds received from the private sector are distributed to organizations that specialize in biodiversity and local conservation projects, with part used to finance the creation of an Emergency Fund for the conservation of lesser-known species on the IUCN Red List. Organizations that participate can enjoy a tax cut of up to 60 percent of their donation, limited to 0.5 percent of turnover, according to the Save Your Logo site.

Tax benefits aside, of course, the effort will not only help endangered plants and animals, but also promises to add that much-sought-after sparkle of genuine corporate generosity to the images of those who participate. Lacoste and French insurer MAAF—which uses a dolphin in its logo—have already jumped on board. Jaguar, Puma, Peugot, Geico, Exxon, Taco Bell and countless others... what about you?

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