Health care providers have learned that cheerful marketing ploys can also improve consumers’ attitudes toward medical care in general. But the humor must be relevant to a customer benefit, not just humor for humor’s sake.

Companies should establish a company blog to help maintain dialog, rather than jump online only to respond to negative information, recommends Steven Solvers, principal at strategic consultancy GBSM Inc. and publisher of the blog Scatterbox.

Sixteen percent of Volvo Rents’ customers account for 89 percent of the company’s business. As a result, 89 percent of the marketing budget is devoted to that 16 percent.

Kodak began offering a high-quality printer that saves up to 50 percent on ink cartridge costs not long after it discovered that the cost of ink was the No. 1 consumer dissatisfaction with home printing.

Timberland created the “Green Index,” which lists such information as the amount of energy consumed to manufacture a particular shoe, and shares the database with competitors to set a transparency standard for the shoe industry.

Epicurean magazine SAVEUR doubled its response rate by abandoning its courtesy voucher in favor of another marketing strategy: the magalog. There are a lot of offers in the magalog, from sweepstakes to discounts.