Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

One of Cinnabon’s most noteworthy, pop-culture-focused marketing campaigns and partnerships came about by chance. You might even say it was a bit of luck. When AMC aired one of its final episodes of Breaking Bad, Saul Goodman (played by Bob Odenkirk) said, “If I’m lucky, in a month from now, best-case scenario, I’m managing a Cinnabon in Omaha.”

The Cinnabon social team quickly capitalized on the mention and tweeted a link to the brand’s careers page to Odenkirk. Soon after that, Cinnabon and the AMC show partnered, with the brand creating a series of campaigns around new seasons as a way to keep itself at the forefront of pop culture and move away from being thought of as simply a mall-based chain.

“The organic nature of the partnership comes from such a good place, and to hear the creators of the show talk about why they were excited when that happened and how it made sense for the vision they had for the show—it just felt organic and therefore very authentic,” said Jill Thomas, vp of global marketing for Cinnabon....

Gary Friedman has a pronounced distaste for discounts. The outspoken Restoration Hardware chairman and CEO blames the retail sector’s reliance on sales and pricing promotions for many of the problems facing the upscale home furnishings chain.

“Much of how we behave promotionally is left over from the Great Recession,” Friedman wrote in a February letter to shareholders published ahead of Restoration Hardware’s disappointing Q4 2015 earnings report. “The multiple sale events and email communications do not reflect the brand we are building, nor are these promotions aligned with how our customers shop with us.”

Restoration Hardware is eliminating traditional promotions altogether in favor of introducing a premium customer rewards program. Priced at $100 per year, its new RH Grey Card offers shoppers a flat 25% savings on all regularly priced merchandise across all of Restoration Hardware’s brands, along with 10% savings on clearance merchandise, complimentary interior design services and reduced interest rates on its RH credit card.

“Our lives are filled with complexity—and we long to break through the clutter to find simplicity,” Friedman said in a press release announcing the RH Grey Card program. “We want to shop for what we want, when we want and receive the greatest value. So rather than navigating countless promotions, we’re changing things… because time is the ultimate luxury.”...

As marketers, we often face tight time frames and demanding deadlines when it comes to publishing our newest content offering. From hitting publish on your next blog post to promoting your next e-book or webinar, let’s all agree to make more time to focus on how to distribute our content wisely.

In 2017, we can buck the content marketing trend of focusing just on content creation and not enough on content promotion. Here are 17 ideas to maximize the ROI of our writing efforts:Landing Page...