What’s Hot in the World of Digital Marketing?

Here’s a quick note of some of the more exciting companies I encountered at TFM&A 2014: cloud.IQ cloud.IQ specialises in cart recovery. On average 75% of online shoppers abandon purchases at some point during the sales process (so-called “dropped baskets”). cloud.IQ’s software lets you track site visitors and automatically remarket to them if they abandon. […]
How to Find Your Way Through the Maze of Digital Marketing

The digital marketing arena is becoming ever more complex. At TFM&A this year there were 180 different seminars covering an enormous variety of topics from content management to web optimisation, customer relationship management (CRM) to data analytics, social media to mobile marketing and on and on. It’s becoming increasingly clear that you can’t be an […]
First to Market – Good or Bad?

Back in the 1990s, when I was involved in telecoms, there was a thing called “First Mover Advantage”. The popular belief among VCs and entrepreneurs was that it was important to be first into the market with a new product or business model, so you could take the lion’s share of the market before anybody […]
Guerrilla or Gorilla? What kind of Marketer are You?

Just before Christmas I received the sad news that Jay Conrad Levinson had died at the age of 80 after a two and a half year battle with bone marrow cancer. Jay was a Giant of the marketing world. In the 1960s he was an old-fashioned Ad Man. As an executive at Leo Burnett and […]
Iceland Foods – a confusing Brand Message

If you haven’t yet picked up on the BBC’s series on Iceland Foods I suggest you have a look at it. Iceland is an amazing entrepreneurial success story. The company was founded in Oswestry on the Welsh border in 1970 by Malcolm Walker. Malcolm is a colourful old fashioned entrepreneur: failure at school, streetwise, unsophisticated, […]
Bought a washing machine recently? My emotions were all in a Spin

I remember when I last bought a washing machine. I bought mine from John Lewis. It was an interesting experience. I couldn’t take it away with me because the car wasn’t big enough so they had to deliver it. Which meant that I paid them several hundred pounds and all I got in return was […]
Focusing on your Core Customer… Why bother?

There’s a lot of noise around these days about focusing on your Core Customer. We’re told that all businesses should stop trying to be all things to all people and target a specific customer segment that’s big enough to deliver the sales we need, but not too big. To an extent this message is not […]
Is Big Brother Watching you? The emerging science of Neuro-Marketing…

One of the most exciting areas of scientific discovery over recent years has been the enormous progress scientists have made in understanding of how our brains work. This has been made possible by huge advances in the quality of brain imaging. Modern scanners mean we can now see which parts of the brain are active […]