John’s Blog

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

Over the last few months we have been working with a major retailer in Manila developing their retail strategy over the next few years. This has included consultancy and workshops with the key stakeholders. This has been a fun project to be involved with and we have seen the team grow and develop over that

New Vision” Forum is a two day workshop designed specifically and only for leading retailers in the garden and farm retail sectors. The Forum is a high powered visionary think-tank for industry leaders to help them develop a focused strategy to continue to grow business and industry over the next few years. A new series

During recent weeks I have presented at a number of conferences that have focused on “local” and the importance of local businesses to the community. When it comes to “local” I am in the confused group as like many consumers I am not sure what local means. I am fully aware that the dictionary definition

Food tourism is the “hot” trend and retailers are using their fresh offer to grow sales, everyone is on the fresh fruit and vegetable band wagon, or are they? A new report from the UK reveals that many children believe farms grow mud. The key results say: One in 50 pupils believes that farmers harvest potato waffles

Garden Tourism is a major tourist sector. One third of tourists around the world visit at least one garden when on vacation and garden centre customers visit at least one garden a year. These are some of the facts that Prof Richard Benfield revealed when he conducted a series of workshops in Western Australia during