John’s Blog

Food tourism: A practical marketing guide, by John and Linda Stanley – reviewed by Annals of Tourism research. This book is a new welcome addition to food tourism practice and literature. The book has ten sections, divided into four parts. In the first part, the authors present an introductory chapter followed by a chapter titled ‘‘The Changing Tourists’’. […]

I was meeting a potential client in Chatsworth in New South Wales whilst on the road. I arrived early and decided to have a coffee. I had a range of coffee shops to choose from. The one that grabbed my attention was Lid and Jar. Why?… They had decided to take the “high” ground with

The Growing Chefs Program in BC is where growers and chefs encourage school children to get engaged with growing and cooking local produce. Whilst I was in BC there was a fundraising dinner for “one-of-a-kind.” Local chefs worked with local growers, and the little chefs from the local school, to produce a meal created from

Those of you that have been to one of my presentations lately will be aware I do a session on Millennials. I picked this up from the Buzz magazine in the USA. It adds another piece to the jigsaw. Make it fun! That’s what Millennials are saying when responding to a nationwide survey conducted by

Cache Creek…where is that I can hear you asking. I asked the same question when I recently had the opportunity to work with a retail client in the town. Cache Creek has a population of 1,040 people and is situated 354 kilometres north east of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. It was mid-October when I

Parklets was a new word to me, but a great concept. Parks are more important at weekends and roads to move traffic are less important. Therefore cities like Rio and San Paulo close specific streets to traffic and create parklets or “pop-up” parks for the weekend. You find the locals taking a walk and using

There are two styles of retailing that we discovered in Rio. The top end retailers are displaying with flair and the salespeople are very engaging. Then the rest of retailing in my opinion has some challenges. Many retailers have arrived at what I believe is the final promotion,”70% Off”. Once you arrive at that promotion

What skills do you need to keep customers engaged? I have been to a number of conferences over the last few months where almost every speaker that is focused on marketing trends has talked about “customer inclusion” or providing a “remarkable experience” as part of the journey to grow a business in this changing world.

Many pundits would argue that the garden centre model of the sixties will not work in the future. There are number of reasons for this, these include: The move to urban living rather than suburban living and the need for garden centres to be near the consumer, especially as this consumer is not prepared to

During August I presented at the Petfood Forum China in Shanghai. This was my fourth visit to this region, but the first time downtown as the conference was held at the Expo site. I arrived the week that the stock market crashed in Shanghai although if you read the China Daily you would not have