From the category archives:

Sales

Starbucks aren’t quite themselves

July 25, 2009

When a brand gets too big for its boots it can always change them for loafers. That’s what the Seattle behemoth, Starbucks appears to be doing by going all bohemian. In an apparent throwback to their origins of the 70s, customers can listen to live music and poetry and even buy alcohol. But, more surprisingly, [...]

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Future of online retailing

July 15, 2009

WARNING: this is a lengthy diatribe on ecommerce. If online retailing isn’t your thing then run away now. If it does float your boat then grab a coffee, my friend: Scoble has been posting lately about the future of the Internet, calling it the Web 2010, others are more likely to call it Web 3.0. [...]

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Tesco profits can afford them green equity

May 13, 2009

The recent reports of Tesco’s profit show they’ve been outstanding while others have cried ‘recession’. A 53rd week changes the picture somewhat, but lets round off profits at £3 billion. Bravo. They’re launching a banking arm soon and it’s going to shake the big boys out of plenty of high street business, but what’s next? [...]

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Biscuit marketing

April 30, 2009

Complacent and lazy marketers know people like to follow the crowd. There’s safety in numbers, right? They play this card as often as possible with their marketing messages. The company mindset can be, ‘Why do we need to do any better when product X sells just fine?’ It strikes me that the banking and motor [...]

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Drive-throughs break out

March 15, 2009

My local Greggs’ bakery is a massively busy shop. So much so its small car park is log jammed from 11am to 3pm EVERY day. From day one I said they could have designed a drive-through system and probably made themselves even more successful (and certainly more efficient). Well, it seems fast food won’t have [...]

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Let down gently

February 27, 2009

Your supplier is very busy. You know this because you chased your order and were told so with plenty of excuses and apologies. I’ve always subscribed to the theory that if a customer phones you for an update on completion, you’ve failed. Not in a ‘call the administrators sense,’ but in a service world, the [...]

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Ramsay screams success

February 20, 2009

A business is an organic entity. Most stakeholders would wish their company to ‘grow’ but it can be ‘starved’ of orders, ‘bleed’ cash and ‘haemorrhage’ profits. Yet the biggest indicator of its living matter is the fact that people make a company (well, certainly the vast majority). The attitude of staff is the telling piece [...]

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At Sir Alan’s behest

December 26, 2008

Here’s your Apprentice moment: If you had a fruit stall in a town centre market, and assuming your stock had a one day shelf life, toward the close of business, would you: a) behave exactly as you did at 8am and bin all left over product each day; b) slash prices hours before closing to [...]

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Buck the trend

November 15, 2008

I’m sure you’ve heard the world economy is broken. With so much reporting of the negative it’s easy to obliterate the positives. Here’s a couple of diamonds in the rough for you though: – Apple finished their fiscal fourth quarter (to 27th Sept) with sales up 35%. All the numbers have gone north which is [...]

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Has a whale landed on you?

October 31, 2008

There’s a lovely corner shop in my village. It’s completely typical, run by an Indian family where nana holds the night shift ‘till 10pm. It’s an extremely well run family business where the profits have gone back into structural renovations. You couldn’t buy a pack of mints from a more spotless mini supermarket. But Tesco [...]

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Chartered Marketing’s oxymoron

October 18, 2008

I recently attended the Chartered Institute of Marketing event, ‘Communication for profitable customer relationships.’ I wasn’t going to post about it, but the best speaker of the day (Dr Neil Hair) blogged about it and I wanted to join him. The day’s speakers were good, although Prof. Ballantyne from New Zealand was probably too academic [...]

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Recession-proof is work of Hollywood

October 8, 2008

Heard anyone talking (bragging?) lately that her industry is recession resistant? It seems the DVD business is just that according to DreamWorks CEO, Jeffrey Katzenberg. Chocolate and cycling are seeing the same anecdotal sentiment as the crunching of credit gets ever louder. But, just like the man, no business is an island. It needs a [...]

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Fake becomes fashionable

October 3, 2008

The Royal Mint said last week that one in 50 pound coins you come across could be fake. This really hit home that bogus goods are seeping into everyday consumerism. Earlier this year Channel 4’s Dispatches programme reported that companies are losing a fortune in revenue and brand credibility to counterfeiters. Much of the goods [...]

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August the advertising month

September 2, 2008

Is it me, or did an inordinate amount of the tech news from both sides of the pond seem to be about advertising last month? Not really surprising considering online is about the only area of advertising that’s going to grow this year. Here’s what I think are the more notable ones: – The ever-innovative [...]

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EVERYONE is a marketer

August 16, 2008

Every person in your organisation who has contact – direct or otherwise – with your customers is a marketer. Fact. The guy who served me popcorn in the cinema on the weekend is a marketer. He could’ve asked cheerily ‘What movie are you guys heading to?’ but he didn’t. Instead he decided to make his [...]

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Don’t lift the bar, teleport it

August 9, 2008

F1 fans will know the popular mantra well-used across the sport, ‘If you’re not going forwards, you’re actually going backwards.’ It speaks volumes for everyone’s permanent devotion to improving through innovation (and invention of course). You see, over the course of a season teams will gain a handful of seconds per lap. Therefore, if you’re [...]

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Selling is a negative affair

August 6, 2008

Selling is as often as much about the lack of negatives as it is about the number of positives beholden to your features and benefits. That restaurant you ate in last month may have had clean cutlery and smartly dressed staff but you didn’t think better of them for it, did you? That’s because you [...]

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Has Porter made strategy too easy?

July 20, 2008

My economics’ lecturer once told me that if I ever got the chance of a job with strategy in the title to open my arms wide and grab it. We’ve all read and agreed with Michael Porter’s assessment that there are just two generic strategies to choose in business, (a) be cheaper than your competitor, [...]

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