Category Guru in a Bottle

October 24, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle  No comments

A common misconception often made by small business owners is that marketing is for larger, more established businesses.

I had a chat about this with John Ponsford who spent four days last week completely rewiring all the lights in our house.

I asked John how he gets referrals and he explained that all of his work is through recommendation and word of mouth. He’s nervous about spending money on marketing and unsure what results he could achieve if he went down this route. He doesn’t advertise in the Yellow Pages but doesn’t know what he should do or where he should start.

I commended him for the way he and his father quietly got on with the job; how pleasant they were i...

October 13, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

In business, it’s more important than ever to push the boundaries in order to achieve a competitive advantage. It’s about being brave. And doing things that your competitors can only dream about.

As the world shrinks smaller, the importance of pushing the boundaries and striving for greatness is at an all-time high. And this partly explains why the makers of Grand Theft Auto V (GTAV) – Rockstar – have become the titans of the video gaming industry.

There are very few industries outside of medical, technology, engineering or defence where a company can blow a cool $250m in research and development...

October 5, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle  No comments

Ever had the sinking feeling that you’ve done all that was expected of you to entice the customer or client to come back but they simply leave without making a purchase or don’t bother returning your call?

There are five key reasons why customers tend to walk away and not come back:

1. They die (1%)
2. They move (3%)
3. They are lured by a competitor (14%)
4. They are unhappy with the product, service or price (14%)
5. They are unhappy with the way that they’re treated (68%).

Whilst sales and marketing professionals have possibly little influence over the first four reasons why customers do a runner, salespeople and business owners certainly have complete control ov...

October 5, 2013,  Events, Guru in a Bottle  No comments

Leading PR and sports marketing expert Ardi Kolah discusses the findings of his unique global report that identified opportunities for sports marketing and consultancy services to 2022 at the forthcoming ICCO Summit in Paris on 10-11 October 2013.

Kolah recently advised the Department for Business Innovation & Skills (BIS) in the wake of the phenomenal success of London 2012 Olympic Games and his recommendations have influenced the British Government’s growth strategy for business and professional services.

Kolah’s briefing for ICCO Members includes:

1. identifying the new business opportunities;
2. explaining the timescales and bidding processes;
3. reporting/estimating the budg...

September 26, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

In the past, marketing managers used social media as just another channel for publishing content and listening to their community. However, to maximize the success of social marketing, you need to become adept at integrating social media into your existing marketing programs and strategies. In fact, you have to do more than social media. You have to do social marketing!

Increasingly, marketing managers are exploring new ways to use a variety of channels in order to reach audiences with compelling content...

September 19, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

Last week I was in the audience for a debate at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in the UK.

The panel discussion turned to the value of public relations and getting more bang from your PR buck. The discussion moved onto the best practice of PR framed by the Barcelona Principles: to measure PR success in terms of inputs, outputs and outcomes as discussed in my latest book, High Impact Marketing That Gets Results.

So let’s go through what this means in practice, and see how you can apply this if you are using an external agency for your PR and public affairs (PA) efforts.

Desired audience segments

This is an extremely important part of the PR process...

September 18, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  One comment

No matter whether you work agency or client-side, each day or week brings new challenges in how you engage with customers, clients, supporters, members and volunteers.

In the past, social media was used as just another channel for publishing content that would engage with each of these audiences. But today, doing that alone just isn’t enough. To maximise the success of social marketing you need to become adept at integrating social media into your existing marketing programmes and strategies. In fact, you have to do more than social media. You have to do social marketing!

This FREE Vocus White Paper explores how to add social to every marketing activity in order to amplify ...

September 12, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

In the modern world of marketing, it’s less “what you say” and more “what you do” that counts, a theme that runs through my latest book, High Impact Marketing That Gets Results.

This mantra has led organisations and companies to actively use customer collaboration as a marketing strategy.

Think open-source software, smartphone apps and customer reviews on TripAdvisor and Amazon. Consumers today are active – not passive – participants in just about every link of the value chain.

Thinking of consumers not as units of economic value to be unlocked for profit but as ‘fans of brands’ has a lot of mileage.

One of the best examples started long before the age of ...

September 4, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

It may not be obvious, but the world of rock ‘n’ roll knows a lot more about how to connect with consumers in a powerful way than many multi-national companies with multi-million budgets to match, a point I make in my latest book, The Art of Influencing and Selling.

And I don’t mean by connecting with consumers through iTunes and the mobile internet, although of course that’s a proven way of reaching music fans. What I want to talk about is about ‘rendering authenticity’ in order to connect with the next generation of consumers and fans.

The term was conceived by James H Gilmore and Joseph Pine, two US academics that at the turn of the 21st century wrote about ho...

August 31, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

When the global economy flags, do Americans buy less soap?

And when the global economy picks up, do South Africans drink more tea?

And do British consumers purge themselves on guilty pleasures like chocolate when they see a rise in the value of real estate?

These may sound like Trivial Pursuit questions but in fact were part of a heavy weight econometric study conducted by Mintel and the Economist Intelligence Unit earlier this year that looked at household spending trends across five emerging markets – China, India, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey – and contrasted this with consumer expenditure trends in the US and UK.

Key findings:

• Though some consumer tastes are conve...