August 2014

I was working in Tasmania, Australia at the start of the month and dropped into the Tourist Bureau and discovered a great leaflet from the town of Burnie. It was entitled “meet the MAKERS of BURNIE. There’s a story around every corner”. The leaflet talks about the people first and then the businesses. It was […]

Many of you will have attended one of my Ghost Town, Clone Town, Home Town workshops. One of the main concerns in communities is what do you do with empty shop fronts. Look what Liverpool in the UK are doing. “Opera for Chinatown ” is held in Duke Street which is the oldest Chinese community

There are only 1600 pandas left in the world according to WWF. This is a marketing opportunity to make people aware of the crisis and to build tourism. WWF joined forces with French artist Paulo Grangeon this year to create the “1600 Panda World Tour”. 1600 cuddly pandas are travelling the world in force. I came

We are all aware that retailing is changing, but, are you taking the appropriate steps to work with the changes? Many performance reports I see have the same pattern. Overall in-store sales down, gross profit down, average sale and average price down, whilst stock turn is up. This indicates that retailers are drawing consumers in

The industry is about to see the “millennials” customer become more interested in garden products as they develop their homes. These are your 20 to 30 year old consumers, who are moving into apartments and new houses and looking for inspiration to make their homes unique. Compared to older customer groups they are more distrusting