High Impact Marketing That Gets Results tagged posts

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 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 6, 2013,  News  No comments

Nestlé-owned Häagen-Dazs is one of the most iconic ice cream brands in the world and has successfully connected with female consumers for over half a century.

Earlier this year, the ice cream brand decided to go back to its marketing roots and develop a social media engagement strategy that would create word-of-mouth buzz around the brand as well as the launch of its new premium product in the UK.

A key outcome for its brand managers was to increase consumer engagement on its UK Facebook page and build awareness and bookings for its new Boudoir campaign as well as engage with brand advocates on Twitter.

The Boudoir was an exclusive ‘pop-up club’ that was developed as p...

October 13, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

In business, it’s more important than ever to push the boundaries in order to achieve a competitive advantage. It’s about being brave. And doing things that your competitors can only dream about.

As the world shrinks smaller, the importance of pushing the boundaries and striving for greatness is at an all-time high. And this partly explains why the makers of Grand Theft Auto V (GTAV) – Rockstar – have become the titans of the video gaming industry.

There are very few industries outside of medical, technology, engineering or defence where a company can blow a cool $250m in research and development...

October 5, 2013,  News  No comments

I’m fascinated by real-life experiences of really bad customer service.

It’s not because I have some prurient interest in disasters or the bad luck to befall customers but I genuinely want to understand how marketing can be improved by learning from mistakes made by some of the biggest brands in the world.

It’s not the sort of content PR folk want to see in a blog of course so I’ve had to use social media to dig deep and uncover examples I’d like to share with you. Some appear in my latest book, High Impact Marketing That Gets Results.

The following has been kindly submitted by Barry Maher, a US-sales and marketing guru and author of Filling the Glass: The Sceptics...

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 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 ...

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

The over 50s currently account for 80% of the wealth of the UK – some £300 billion and spending by households including someone over the age of 65 is £109 billion. These figures will only get bigger as the shift towards an ageing population gathers pace.

Today there are 10.3m people in the UK aged over 65, by 2020 that figure will be 12.5m and on current projections that will have increased to 16m by 2030.

Within that group, older segments are the fastest growing and by 2050 it is estimated that there will be more than a quarter of a million centenarians in the UK.

But this growth isn’t confined to the UK.

For example, in the US, the number of people over 50 will have t...

August 7, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

Advocates of using the email marketing to drive sales tend to have a small library of well-chosen facts at their fingertips.

Check-out these eye-popping stats, for example.

Global email traffic stands at 166 billion emails a day; there are 3.84 billion email accounts – three times as many as all of Facebook and Twitter combined – and around 72 per cent of all users check their in box at least six times a day.

With a global average open-rate of around 20 per cent, about 5 per cent of these users click through to a web site in order to make a purchase and 83 per cent of this customer segment tend to have a higher propensity to spend more per transaction when marketed and sold...

July 26, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle  No comments

Few would argue that the nature of social media, communication, information and the global economy have merged to transform the way we must now communicate and prospect for customers and clients.

In many respects, the strategies that are often employed to predict and manage customers’ or clients’ purchasing behaviour have been spurred on by the growth of online data, which in itself has its own challenges for the sales and marketing professional.

As I discuss in my new book, High Impact Marketing That Gets Results, what started life within the airline and hotel market segments has rapidly been adopted across other market segments that now database and online strategies pr...