September 26, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

In the past, marketing managers used social media as just another channel for publishing content and listening to their community. However, to maximize the success of social marketing, you need to become adept at integrating social media into your existing marketing programs and strategies. In fact, you have to do more than social media. You have to do social marketing!

Increasingly, marketing managers are exploring new ways to use a variety of channels in order to reach audiences with compelling content...

September 19, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

Last week I was in the audience for a debate at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in the UK.

The panel discussion turned to the value of public relations and getting more bang from your PR buck. The discussion moved onto the best practice of PR framed by the Barcelona Principles: to measure PR success in terms of inputs, outputs and outcomes as discussed in my latest book, High Impact Marketing That Gets Results.

So let’s go through what this means in practice, and see how you can apply this if you are using an external agency for your PR and public affairs (PA) efforts.

Desired audience segments

This is an extremely important part of the PR process...

September 18, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  One comment

No matter whether you work agency or client-side, each day or week brings new challenges in how you engage with customers, clients, supporters, members and volunteers.

In the past, social media was used as just another channel for publishing content that would engage with each of these audiences. But today, doing that alone just isn’t enough. To maximise the success of social marketing you need to become adept at integrating social media into your existing marketing programmes and strategies. In fact, you have to do more than social media. You have to do social marketing!

This FREE Vocus White Paper explores how to add social to every marketing activity in order to amplify ...

September 12, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

In the modern world of marketing, it’s less “what you say” and more “what you do” that counts, a theme that runs through my latest book, High Impact Marketing That Gets Results.

This mantra has led organisations and companies to actively use customer collaboration as a marketing strategy.

Think open-source software, smartphone apps and customer reviews on TripAdvisor and Amazon. Consumers today are active – not passive – participants in just about every link of the value chain.

Thinking of consumers not as units of economic value to be unlocked for profit but as ‘fans of brands’ has a lot of mileage.

One of the best examples started long before the age of ...

September 8, 2013,  Events, News  No comments

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) decision to award Tokyo, Japan the right to host the 2020 Summer Olympic Games has benefits for Japan beyond economic and sporting opportunities.

Fuelled by the city’s dynamic atmosphere and youth-driven culture, the successful bid to host the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan will have an important role to play in the healing process of Japan following the national earthquake tragedy in 2011.

As I explained in my latest report, ‘Global Opportunities for sports marketing, infrastructure and consultancy services 2022′, published by IMR, over the next few years, Japan will host the 2014 ISU World Figure Skating Championships, ...

September 4, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

It may not be obvious, but the world of rock ‘n’ roll knows a lot more about how to connect with consumers in a powerful way than many multi-national companies with multi-million budgets to match, a point I make in my latest book, The Art of Influencing and Selling.

And I don’t mean by connecting with consumers through iTunes and the mobile internet, although of course that’s a proven way of reaching music fans. What I want to talk about is about ‘rendering authenticity’ in order to connect with the next generation of consumers and fans.

The term was conceived by James H Gilmore and Joseph Pine, two US academics that at the turn of the 21st century wrote about ho...

August 31, 2013,  News  No comments

This article by marketing journalist Maeve Hosea first appeared in Marketing Week on 22 August 2013

Fancy a free electric toothbrush? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Colgate’s giveaway promotion at London’s Waterloo station last month, where people could swap their old electric toothbrush for a free ProClinical model worth £169.99, ended in chaos. Hundreds of people swamped the stand, which lead to Network Rail forcing the company to shut down the promotion.

August 31, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

When the global economy flags, do Americans buy less soap?

And when the global economy picks up, do South Africans drink more tea?

And do British consumers purge themselves on guilty pleasures like chocolate when they see a rise in the value of real estate?

These may sound like Trivial Pursuit questions but in fact were part of a heavy weight econometric study conducted by Mintel and the Economist Intelligence Unit earlier this year that looked at household spending trends across five emerging markets – China, India, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey – and contrasted this with consumer expenditure trends in the US and UK.

Key findings:

• Though some consumer tastes are conve...

August 31, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

That line came from the Hollywood movie The Social Network and gave credence to the view that the old interruption model of brand communication doesn’t work anymore.

And by that I mean advertising.

Check the stats. The average consumer is exposed to a minimum of 3,500 marketing messages in a day and 99% of these ads fail to have any impact.

It’s marketing overload and marketing clutter. Consumers’ brains are now programmed to screen out – not screen in – messages. It’s a nightmare if you still continue to cling to ‘high decibel’ marketing techniques.

Old style media owners got fat by selling mass audiences to advertisers...

August 20, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

In the latest NBCUniversal study (July 2013) on the female pay-television audience, the global entertainment network shed light on what Southeast Asian women look for in a brand or a service.

The psychographic research dubbed as “High Heeled Warriors” discovered that Asian women aged 20 to 44 are complex, and that a careful segmentation of this market bracket is crucial for a marketing campaign to succeed.

“You need to really know who this woman is. If you want to send a message, you need to know what she wants,” says Christine Fellowes, Universal Networks International’s managing director for Asia Pacific.

The media company surveyed over 3,000 female subscribers...