2013

In the first three months of the year I have travelled between Japan and the USA and have had to cope with customer service in both countries. When one travels to Japan the first reaction is that most sales staff are rude. Walk into a store and the staff ignores you. The reason is culture. […]

One of the challenges retailers have in 2013 is connecting with the community and being seen as relevant within your catchment area. One way of connecting is with schools. One of the challenges schools have is bullying and if a retailer could connect with the school and promote healthy eating as well as helping to

Our first webinar of the year was on Phone Apps and how we can use them as retailers. We need to understand how are consumers are using mobile devices so that we can design our marketing campaigns more effectively as retailers and small businesses. Harvard University in the USA has done a detailed study on

Keeping up with trends is a real challenge these days. One way I keep up is to follow the Trend Hunter. His latest ideas for February are in the Trend Report. There are some real gems in here to search out. If you are looking for product trends spend some time looking at the ideas

If you had asked me last year if I needed a Phone App I would have probably laughed and kept using the marketing tools I already had. It is 2013 and the world is changing at a rapid speed that means how we market our business also changes rapidly… Our consumers are now leaving home

What does a shoe shop in New York, a watch retailer in Poznan, Poland and a second hand shop in De Bilt, Netherlands have in common? They have all used cardboard as part of their latest retail store design. Cardboard is coming into fashion as a material to be used in store design, merchandising and

Providing a consumer experience and convenience for the consumer has become a real challenge for “Bricks” retailers who need to develop new ways of building loyalty. According to Mark Hurd, the President of Oracle, one of the solutions is for “Bricks“ retailers to embrace personalised webpage’s for their loyal consumers. This has already started in

Retailers often tell me that the new channels of media marketing are too expensive. I often comment that the expense is in time not in material costs. There are various tools in the market place to help you keep marketing costs down. One that should be in all our data bases for when we need