Homeaway - The online holiday rental company took the decision to appoint former Visa and Vodafone marketer Mariano Dima as chief marketing officer. A newly created role that will oversee all global marketing, corporate communications and brand initiatives. Dima's CV includes 20 years of marketing, product and business development for brands that cinlude PepsiCo, Vodafone, Levi Straus and Visa.

Regus - Eva Eisenschimmel has become the latest senior marketing executive to join Regus. She follows Rick Vlemmiks who joined as their most senior marketer last year. Eisenschimmel, who left Lloyds earlier this year after three years as group marketing director, joins in september and has been tasked with looking after the company’s global marketing efforts.

Ryanair - Ryanair has appointed John Hurley as its first chief technology officer, this move comes as Rynair attempts to forge its 'online travel revolution' that will ‘change the world of online air travel’.
Hurley will be responsibile for developing its fledgling digital and technology strategy, with the company in the process of recruiting a team of up to 200 people across marketing, content and strategy that Hurley will oversee. Hurley joins from educational publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt where he was vice president of software development.

Instagram - James Quarles has made the move from parent company Facebook to his new role as global head of business and brand development for Instagram.
Quarles will be responsible for the overall growth of Instagram as well as “building a broad asset of solutions for brands of all sizes on Instagram”.
The move means he will have to relocate from London to Instagram’s US headquarters and report into the company’s founder and CEO Kevin Systrom.
Instagram has been “deliberately” slowly rolling out advertising on the app since it first began trialling ads with a small group of brands in the US last November. Read more about Instagrams new features.

National Trust - Jordan replaces Clare Mullen, who left 4 weeks ago to move to India. She will take over towards the end of the year, although a date has not yet been set. Harry Heeley, previously commercial director at the Trust, is running the marketing department in the interim.
Jordan’s appointment comes as the National Trust renews its focus on digital. It will relaunch its website and mobile app at the start of next year to shift away from just providing information about its properties to offering more engaging content personalised to visitors based on where they live and their previous visits.

Buzzfeed - BuzzFeed has appointed ad sales veteran Greg Coleman as its new president with the task of ramping up its social advertising offering to brands. He joins from Criteo, where he was president. His other experience includes being a former president and chief revenue officer at Huffington Post and vice president of sales at Yahoo. Coleman replaces Jon Steinberg who left last month to join the MailOnline.
In addition to overseeing sales, creative services, marketing and products and business development, he is tasked with securing a greater share of brands’ ad budget for Buzzfeed’s social advertising offering.

Celebrity endorsement is a classic marketing technique used by many brands, but is it still relevant and effective?

Recent academic research studied celebrity endorsement in the charity sector; it aimed to find out if celebrities were actually effective practice for charities and whether it makes the public more likely to donate or give their time for the cause.

Snapchat has been with us for over 18 months now, it's becoming hugely popular in a short space of time and takes up another precious widget space on our smartphones. We've seen that Facebook tried to buy it for $3 million and in May 2014 it was said that over 700 million pictures were being sent per day! So how can you utilise this platform to grow your brand?

• The first thing is that is no clear way of doing it - not like other social media channels which encourage advertising on their platform and even have guides or specialised components to assist you. If you decided to advertise on snapchat, you're pretty much on your own and have to learn from success stories or trail and error.

• This brings us on the next point, because theres no 'correct formula', its well worth checking out other examples. Big brands are really experimenting and trailing different things. A popular use of it is to give a discount code available only to snapchat users and lasting 24 hours.

• How do you stay in someones mind when you have only 10 seconds? It's the ultimate marketing challenge. It's needs to be engaging and also unique, as well as rememberable.

• We currently have a story telling culture in marketing, this has been evident in the rise of Storytelling roles. Snapchat is a very simplistic app with few features, but one of those is 'Story'. This allows users to create stories made up of 10 second videos that can be watched in a 24 hour period.

• It's advert free which means you're not directly competing. Other platforms have paid advertising which can work against yourself. When you combine this with the fact that most brands aren't using it and it isn't geared towards advertising then it almost doesn't feel like you're being targeted when you get one.

• Don't take it too seriously! Snapchat's whole concept is built on varnishing, it's never going to be your most important digital platform but its worth playing around with. It's also worth noting that there's no analytics beyond seeing the number of followers you have. Snapchat finds friends based on phone contacts, therefore for a brand it can be very hard to initially build up a following and would need another channel to push users to Snapchat.

Here's some examples to get you started:

CK One fragrance celebrated it's 20 year landmark with a huge campaign that involved a print media, snapchat and tumblr. They used snapchat to share content from the shoot and engage both ways with users.

Frozen yogurt chain 16 Handles jumped on the Snapchat train in January 2013, they asked fans to take a snapchat of themselves at one of its locations. In return, they received a snap with discount code for 16%, 50% or 100% off.

Lynx was the first brand I heard of using Snapchat. They focused of on addressing Snapchat’s reputation for ‘sexting’, as pictures could be ‘risque’, and ‘on those odd occasions where responses were close to the line, responded with an image of the new Deep Space shower gel, urging people to clean up and take a cold shower’.

Clothing retailer, Karmaloop,  has also ventured down the risqué route. They thought this was suitable to their college target audience. Everyday they sent pictures of their new clothing lines, pictures of ‘scantily clad model’s’ and exclusive discount codes. It encouraged fans to post their own videos and images.
Even though it was ‘risque’ and engaged with the ‘sexting’ associated with Snapchat, it attracted more than 2,000 Snapchat friends.

A few alternative ways to use Snapchat include; The NBA created excitement around an event by using behind the scenes clips of Kevin Durant's MVP announcement while GrubHub used Snapchat in a completely different way, they used it find and hire a summer intern.

Latest report from accountancy firm BDO, shows that UK firms are intending to hire staff at the fastest rate for 16 years!

This follows on from news earlier this summer that the UK economy passed pre-recession peak after six years. 

BDO stated that their jobs index for July was at its highest level since 1998. Their jobs index measures hiring plans among firms for three month periods. A 'significant uptick' and an increase in the rate of job creation was behind this rise, which is expected to carry on throughout the rest of the year.

These results also coincided with their optimism index, this measures the expectations of UK firms over a six month period, which were at their highest since over the past 12 months.

Peter Hemington, partner at BDO, stated that "The unprecedented growth we've seen in UK employment this year looks set to continue." However, he went on to explain that some firms are already worried about a lack of suitable candidates, with some firms debating using the "readily available and flexible labour from Europe."

Head over to www.chrysalisrecruitment.com to view all our current vacancies, or contact  0161 8175028 to speak to one of our consultants.

With recent news that HMV is stealing back it's market share in the entertainment industry, rising from it's 10.7% during its administration to its current level of 14.7%. Since being bought out HMV have redesigned store layouts, offered live in-store gigs and overhauled their marketing with a new look website and new loyalty programme. We decided to take a look at other brands that have come back from the brink and how they did it!

Lego - Some brands seem too big to die and that is the category Lego falls into. Lego was a leading toy manufacturer since its creation in 1932, however the turn of the century saw a huge increase in the popularity of electronic toys and video games. By 2004 the company had nearly $1 billion of debt. On the verge of bankruptcy, the global recession actually helped rather then hindered Lego. Sales began to rise due to it's low prices, the company reduced its workforce and halved its produce line to become more profitable. It now stands as the fourth largest toy manufacturer,  enjoyed recent success with its blockbuster movie

Old Spice - Another hugely successful brand, it reached its peak in the 1970s but things turned soured by 1990s as their consumer base had aged. Procter and Gamble bought out Old Spice an completely revamped the brand with series of amazing adverts aimed at a younger generation. These videos went viral and as a result restored Old Spice as the leader of the body wash market. Here's one of our favourite Old Spice ads;


Netflix - Around three years ago, not many people still believed in Netflix and according to a Forbes survey; people thought that blackberry was more likely to survive then Netflix. But thanks to a number of original series they developed, including Orange is the New Black, House of Cards and a revamped Arrested Development, Netflix destroyed all other streaming devices. Its used 10x more than rivals Amazon Instant Video and Hulu. It's originality and the fact it established itself as market leader lead to Netflix being the second best performing company in 2013 by stock price.

Burberry - Burberry's own success was also its biggest killer. Their famous checkered pattern had been associated with chavy Britain and as a result damaged the brand. Their was also a lack of vision and clarity throughout the company which left Burberry in no mans land. Angela Ahrendts came in as CEO in 2006 and created a vision of connecting Burberry back to its roots. Over the next six years, it took factory closures, layoffs, leadership shake-ups, and a re-invention of the brand to make this happen. Burberry has gone from strength to strength and now is one of the most anticipated shows at London Fashion week, with Interbrand recently reporting Burberry as the 77th most valuable brand in the world.

Jessops - Famous british retailer was another high street brand to struggle during the recession. Within 18 months of calling the administrators in and reopening Jessops were announcing £70million profits, an incredible feat. This is partly due to Peter Jones who bought the brand for £5million (with £81 million worth of debt). He described Jessops as ‘a very tired, weary estate of 200 stores, of which over 100 were just not profitable," taking inspiration from Apple he redesigned the stores to be more interactive. This, combined with Jessops knowledgable staff (most of whom are avid photographers themselves) created value-add services which are hard to replicate and something that consumers really value.

With BMW officially signing up to be Medium's first advertiser, the blog publishing platform has been pushed back in to the public eye. But what actually is Medium and how can it benefit you?

From the co-founders of Twitter and Blogger, Medium is a platform for sharing content. We're all aware of the importance of content and Medium believe theres more to it. They are firm believers that words are the most important factor and theres much more to come in how we use them on the web.