Hi from Brisbane.

I am sat here wishing for cooler weather would you believe? It is 35 celcius here today and my husband still hasn’t sorted our air conditioner!! I’ve got every single window open, my fans going and I feel like I am sat in a sauna! But hey I guess you are sat in London thinking shut up and enjoy the warm weather…

This week over here marketing news wise, Virgin Blue’s loyalty program team are in trouble for ‘accidently’ sending out an upgrade offer to more than 1 million members. See  for more details. I think the moral of the story here is always double check your emails you are sending out along with your mailing list!

I’ve just finished a contract working for a big multi national company and am back to my volunteering work until something else comes up. The market seems to be looking a bit healthier and my recruitment consultant thinks that January will be a good month, so we shall see as it was reported a month or so ago that unemployment was set to hit 6.8% so it is still a tough market.

I am busy organising a Christmas drinks and nibbles here in Brisbane for fellow CIM members which will be nice. The CIM isn’t that big here in Australia but they are really starting to grow now so it is great to be a part of it all.

Mailed out!

So I have a bit of a gripe this week! And the culprits are direct mail and telemarketers! I used to live in Southfields and the direct mail was pretty intense there but here I have never known anything like it! You empty your mailbox and it is literally full of magazines and companies selling anything from food to dog hydrobaths to telling me what I should be buying my husband for Christmas.

On a smaller scale, I love direct mail and have done many campaigns myself – but every day we have bunches and bunches of mail which a lot of the time is duplicated or out of date stuck in our mailbox.  Now it just goes into the bin without my even looking at it, so my thought on this is would I want my brand to be one of those that  is associated with such a mail out and potentially is annoying its target market??

Don’t call me!

And as for telemarketers, Optus for me (a phone provider) is the most resilient and annoying telemarketer!!

I have had the same woman from Optus call me now on 6 occasions in the last 2 months. Each time I have told her that I am not interested and each time she has said she won’t call me again….and then 10 or so days later I get a call from her. I ask her why she is calling when she says she won’t bother me again, and she then proceeds to tell me that before she goes, she has a new offer for me!

Arghhh. I mean telemarketing must work, otherwise people wouldn’t do it but how far does the telemarketer have to go before they understand that people like me do not want their services – No means no right?, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I am tied in for two years with my iPhone I wouldn’t be using Optus anymore! Many people I know feel the same way so on a larger scale, so what does that say about the brand?

Right, I’m off to sit under the fan! Bye for now