John’s Blog

Whilst in Oregon I met up with Gary Oppenheimer, A CNN Hero and founder of AmpleHarvest.org. What Do AmpleHarvest.org Do? They enable consumers to eliminate hunger and malnutrition in their own community. AmpleHarvest.org connects, in the USA, 40+ million Americans with excess food in their garden and local food pantries. Garden by garden, home and community gardeners and other growers are fighting hunger and malnutrition in America. Their core mission: No

I have worked with libraries around the world for many years, but in recent years many libraries a have become a problem for Local Councils as they have not kept up with consumer trends. Over the last two months I have discovered two entrepreneurial libraries, Mundijong in Western Australia who won the best library in the State, and Howard County Library near Baltimore in the USA, that was awarded the

Finally farmers markets are moving into the management software arena with the introduction this month of a software program coming out of Australia. Farm Market managers can now mange the market from their iPad. Sitetrak is the name of the program and it is worth checking out.  

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 divided into the “Garden Makers”,” Cheese Makers,” “Whisky Makers” and so on. Such an inspiring

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 in Europe. The city has taken old buildings and created murals in the windows of

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 across them in Hong Kong where the airline Cathy Pacific brought them to Hong Kong

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 based on price. This may work in the short term, but is not a long

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 of company advertising, are wary of in-house marketing and engage with each other and businesses

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 period.  

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 of New Vision workshops are planned and I urge you to book now if you

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 is “relating or restricted to a particular area or one’s neighbourhood”. But, what is one’s

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 Just 9% of youngsters have visited a countryside location in the past year Some 1.8million

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 July. Richard is the “garden tourism” guru, based at Central Connecticut State University where he is

This podcast has a special focus on tips for the speaker presenting to international audiences, recorded for Thomas Murrell’s Media Motivators e-zine. It looks at how as a speaker you can “think global and act local” with the customisation of your content. This special podcast was recorded at a National Speakers Association of Australia (NSAA) event in Perth where John was a guest speaker. This will take 10 mins and

This month is focused on Asia as I have been travelling through Hong Kong and working in the Philippines. I have been working with food retailers and developing merchandising strategies. Watch my intro video…

Looking at merchandising in this part of the world there is one simple message..keep it simple. When it comes to displays we often make displays too complicated. Look at the innovators in the market place and they are focused on a simple message using simple props and a few products. The challenge with simple is that it often takes more time to make it look simple. These pictures will illustrate

The book on the plane…Whilst flying to Manila I read “Influencer” by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler. This book is published by Mc Graw Hill in 2013. This book focuses on leading change in businesses and life and presents a very simple formulae that we can all use. It talks about the three key influencers that can make a difference. Focus and measure Find

50% of most food the farmer produces is wasted, this is one of the major issues of the globe today and also a retail opportunity. This month I came across two examples of what we can do to overcome this problem. One was a health store in Ortigas City in the Philippines that promotes its health business by focusing the consumers mind on waste. The other is an article from

One of the things the Asian retailers do well is the use of vehicles as marketing tools. I love the way they can take a vehicle and make it a billboard on wheels. These are just a few pictures from my walks around Manila.

Looking to the future and how retail will change. This excellent article 9 Ways Retail Will Radically Change In The Near Future from the Business Insider this month that Sid Raisch discovered. Well worth the read! “For the past few years, brick-and-mortar retailers didn’t have a fighting chance to compete with the personalization and convenience provided by online shopping. By cultivating mountains of rich customer data, online retailers had the upper hand.

I was recently asked to contribute to the 2014 Retail Experts Survey in the United Kingdom, the following is a snippet from the results. “Retail is always an exciting, dynamic and somewhat challenging space. We have assembled some of the brightest minds in Retail to provide you with their opinions on how technology, e-commerce and social media will change the way Retailers do business in the future…” Key findings and predictions from

At one retail trade show I attended one of the big new trends is “queue busters”. These are hand held iPads that team members use that allow the consumer to pay anywhere in the store. Over recent months I have been promoting that the cash register is now a dinosaur and the move to handheld devices is occurring quickly.

Who are your customers? Like many of us in recent years I was focused on Gen X and on trying to understand what made them buy in store. These days however, I focus my clients on Baby Boomers and Millenniums as their real customers and I now advise that less focus should go towards Gen X. This theory was supported with research carried out in the US and published in