Category Guru in a Bottle

December 14, 2013,  Essential Law for Marketers, Legal update, News  3 comments

Many marketers are ill-prepared for the impact of a raft of new regulations that will severely curtail their direct marketing (DM) activities in 2014.

Recently, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office signalled changes that marketers must implement NOW within business to consumer (B2C) marketing in order to stay within the law and these include:

• where consent is obtained from the customer to receive DM, separate opt-in consent must also be gathered in order to send DM messages on each and every other marketing channel;
• a higher burden of proof of customer consent is now required to be shown by marketers, irrespective of whether the marketing channel is telephone, mo...

December 13, 2013,  News, Social marketing practice, The Art of Influencing and Selling  No comments

According to a new report by regulator Ofcom, UK shoppers topped the list of those that spend comparatively more money shopping online compared with consumers in other countries.

The International Communications Market Report compared the availability, take-up and use of services in the UK and 16 other countries and analysed the responses of over 9,000 consumers across nine countries.

Researchers found that the UK had the highest per capita spend online in 2012, at £1,175, which was up 16% year on year. It was also 35% more than Australia, the second highest country of the eight considered on this metric, and 77% more than the US in third place.

UK consumers were spending ...

December 13, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle  No comments

You may not realise it but marketing had its roots when we were starting to emerge from the caves! In fact, there have been seven distinct phases of marketing since those times.

Here’s a quick tour of where we’ve come from and also what’s around the corner in 2014.

Simple trade era

This was when everything available was made or harvested by hand and was in limited supply. Here, the main activity was ‘hunter/gatherer’ and basic commodities ruled the day. Nothing really changed from the time homo sapiens first came out of their caves until the early nineteenth century (‘pre-industrial revolution phase’)...

November 29, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

A new taskforce has just published Beyond Retail 2013, a new report that suggests the UK’s town centres need reshaping and rebuilding on an unprecedented scale not seen since the end of the Second World War.

But is it realistic to believe traditional town centres can be saved or are they in terminal decline?

The Distressed Town Centre Property Taskforce, set up in the wake of the review by retail marketing consultant Mary Portas believes that town centres should be re-designated as a key Government planning and investment priority.

For the past 13 months, senior retailers, property investors, landlords and financiers have been reviewing the prospects of their high street prop...

November 29, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle  No comments

There’s a universal truth that most business people know: companies and enterprises succeed by getting, stealing, keeping and growing customers and clients.

Customers and clients are the only reason we build railroads, manufacture convenience foods, send satellites into space and manufacture fire retardant furniture.

But there’s a marketing trap.

Most managers are seduced into thinking that what worked yesterday will continue to satisfy customers and clients tomorrow. The trouble is, it probably won’t and it takes courage to lift the scales from our eyes to see how we should change the way we market to them.

Where trouble tends to emerge in carefully crafted brand and m...

November 28, 2013,  Events, Guru in a Bottle  No comments

The coincidence this year of Thanksgiving and the start of Hanukkah is very unusual – it last happened in 1888.

But in a way it’s fitting, as American Jews have been embracing Thanksgiving for more than two centuries.

By the time the first of eight candles in Jewish menorah were lit on Wednesday evening for the start of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, the country was largely closed down for Thursday’s Thanksgiving holiday.

According to the most commonly cited calculation, not only has this not happened for 125 years, but it won’t happen again for more than 70,000 years!

That’s because the Jewish calendar is shifting in relation to the Gregorian calendar very, very slowly… at...

November 22, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

Since the Millennium, social media has grown from teenage fad into an essential communication platform at such unprecedented speed that it’s left the development of privacy laws and regulations in its wake.

A new report by India-based analysts Avendus puts this into context on a global perspective.

There are now over 2.4 billion internet users in the world of which 1.5 billion access the internet through their mobile devices either as a primary or a supplementary device; the penetration of smartphones are expected to grow at a CAGR of 20% to reach 2...

November 21, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

It is 50 years to the week that President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Among the many black and white TV news clips of speeches made by JFK that I’ve been watching this week, one sentence in particular struck a chord with me:

“In each of us there’s a private hope and dream which, if fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone.”

That may sound like a lofty ideal. However, I sincerely believe that as marketers, we all need the conviction to want to make a positive difference for the organisation or enterprise that we are part of and serve. Nothing less will do.

To create something valuable out of nothing more than a compelling vision, or...

November 18, 2013,  Events, Guru in a Bottle  No comments

It’s easy to think everything is doom and gloom when the British economy is staggering to get itself back on its feet and the appearance of cold, overcast skies adds to our general sense of foreboding as the evenings start to draw in and it’s dark by 4.30pm!

But instead of worrying about sales and marketing and whether we’re going to make our end of year figures before it’s time to pack up for the Christmas break, there’s a bunch of entrepreneurs out there that are constantly looking for success in the face of adversity.

I was struck by how successful this thinking is when listening to the presentation of my friend and colleague Professor Jaideep Prabhu of Judge B...

November 14, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

From a very young age we are taught it’s good to share – whether it’s a favourite toy, crayons or bag of potato chips.

It’s something that we see as a positive influence on a child’s development. As a society we want to encourage it throughout adulthood. The desire to share also makes us less selfish and more connected with our environment and those around us.

However, there are occasions when sharing – or rather ‘oversharing’ – can be a bad or negative thing for both the brands we represent and our own, personal brands.

Consciously or not, we are all sharing far more information online than ever before – there are 571 new websites created every minute; Face...