Category Consumer behaviour

May 15, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Guru in a Bottle, Sales practice, The Art of Influencing and Selling  No comments

Yesterday I had a wonderful lunch at my club Bafta in Piccadilly with a great friend of mine, Lena Robinson.

Lena is one of the most gifted business development professionals I’ve ever worked with when we were together at WPP and she now runs an incredible business development powerhouse for agency entrepreneurs called KiwiGirl.

Check it out!  Lena is an inspiration of ideas and new ways of thinking. And yesterday she shared something very special that I wanted to share with you too.

But before I share this with you, let me take you briefly into the conversation we started with over sausages, crab bites, burger and chips and a very nice bottle of wine!

We talked about Guru...

May 1, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Guru in a Bottle, Social marketing practice  No comments

Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, hundreds of millions of consumers around the world cross national borders without a second thought – and often without realising that they’ve done anything unusual. This community scours the web for the ideas, products and relationships that they might not be able to find easily – if at all – where they live.

This borderless community makes up a virtual “Eighth Continent” that’s rapidly accelerating beyond 1bn inhabitants. And it exists wherever a PC/tablet, desktop, mobile phone or TV set top box hooks to the web...

April 24, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Guru in a Bottle, Innovation, Marketing practice, News  No comments

Over the last decade, marketers of branded fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) on both sides of the Atlantic have struggled to withstand the onslaught on their market share from challenger and own-label brands.

The result of increased competition – largely fuelled by globalisation – is that some marketers have been forced to radically re-think their retail and marketing strategies in order to stay ahead of the game. So it may surprise you to learn that packaging innovation has become the ‘go-to’ marketing strategy for these FMCG marketers in order to preserve and boost profitability.

US-based MeadWestvaco Corporation (MWV), a global leader in packaging and packaging solut...

April 17, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Guru in a Bottle  No comments

The choice of colour has become one of the single most important elements in creating a brand. I remember having a conversation about this over lunch with a very good friend and mentor of mine, Wally Olins CBE, who sadly passed away this week at the age of 83.

Wally was an extraordinary person in many ways and was in fact the first person in the UK to have launched a brand consultancy back in the 60s.

Wally understood – perhaps more than any other person of his generation – that branding is intrinsically linked with colour.

It was something he felt passionate about and when asked to create a new mobile phone brand by Hutchinson Telecom after its acquisition of a controlling...

April 11, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Guru in a Bottle, Marketing practice, The Art of Influencing and Selling, Thought Leadership  No comments

Choice is now something we all take for granted – from the type of product or service we desire, the features we look for that best suit our particular needs and requirements and even how much we’re prepared to pay for this.

Traditional marketing thinking went something like this: “Increase levels of customer satisfaction and give customers more of what they want is the key to commercial success.”

Well, the reality is somewhat different in 2014.

Much of the time, most of us don’t think too deeply about how happy we are about the product we’ve just bought at the supermarket or the service we’ve received at the local shoe repairer or whether it completely fulfils our ne...

March 7, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Guru in a Bottle, Sponsorship News  2 comments

Green Schools Revolution is one of the most innovative corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes in the UK and could signal a new way for brand owners to engage with children and their families and turn traditional B2C sponsorship on its head.

That was the message delivered at a special PRCA Breakfast Briefing where Hopscotch Consulting explained its role in helping The Co-operative develop a nationwide CSR programme that has bagged a ‘Special Award for Green Sponsorship’ at this year’s UK Sponsorship Awards 2014 to be announced later this month.

You could say Hopscotch Consulting has big plans for its Green Schools Revolution and has leap-frogged the competition...

February 15, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Guru in a Bottle, High Impact Marketing that Gets Results, The Art of Influencing and Selling  No comments

Amazon built a gigantic global business on the back of choice and delivering products when the customer wants it.

As I mention in my previous blog, Amazon has taken this a step further and is planning to box and deliver products that it expects customers in a specific area will want based on previous orders, product searches, wish lists, shopping cart contents, returns and other online shopping practices it gleans from its customers’ shopping patterns, even before they’ve clicked ‘buy.’

However, some researchers are predicting a backlash to these and other strategies that are all designed to get us to spend more.

The main contentious point of consumer-ology, a term coin...

February 6, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Guru in a Bottle, Marketing practice  No comments

Romance with privately-owned companies and their brands looks like going from strength to strength in most global markets but the same can’t be said of the public’s view of governments where urgent action is now required to reverse a global ‘trust deficit’ among political leaders.

These and other fascinating findings are contained in the 14^th Annual Edelman Trust Barometer 2014 that maps trust and other sentiment levels among 33,000 respondents from around the world.

The online survey, the largest of its kind in the world, was conducted towards the end of 2013 and the early part of 2014.

It sampled the views of 27,000 general and 6,000 informed respondents aged betw...

January 31, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, High Impact Marketing that Gets Results, Legal update  3 comments

The Seattle-based company successfully obtained a US patent on Christmas Eve 2013 for what it calls “anticipatory shipping”. This was the gist of the news item that appeared in the Wall Street Journal (17 January 2014) that’s caused something of a stir on social networks, such as Slashdot. According to the WSJ, Amazon in the US may box and ship products that it expects customers in a specific area will want based on previous orders, product searches, wish lists, shopping cart contents, returns and other online shopping practices it gleans from its customers’ shopping patterns, even before they’ve clicked ‘buy’.

Amazon has worked out how to cut delivery time...

January 27, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Events  No comments