Category Marketing practice

February 28, 2015,  data protection, EU General Data Protection Regulation, Legal update, Marketing practice, News, Social marketing practice  No comments

We have two feature articles written by Ardi Kolah:

Data protection rules overhaul – Top Tips for compliance

Extract: Data protection and the security of data is perhaps the biggest issue facing the advertising and marketing sector from a business continuity perspective as to get this badly wrong opens the door to punitive fines of up to five per cent of global turnover or €100m. Ardi Kolah shares his top ten tips for marketers.

Urgent Action is Required as Data Breaches hit Record Highs

Extract: According to global digital security firm Gemalto, 1,541 data breaches in 2014 led to one billion data records being compromised, representing a four per cent increase in data...

September 10, 2014,  Brand marketing, Guru in a Bottle, Legal update, Marketing practice, News  No comments

In a spectacular volte-face, Coca-Cola has embraced the voluntary front of pack ‘traffic light’ system that alerts British consumers to the calorific value of the product in order for them to make informed choices about what they are ingesting and help move them towards having a more balanced diet and healthier lifestyle.

What’s disappointing is that the beverage giant didn’t have the foresight to embrace this opportunity last year when the voluntary labelling scheme was first introduced by the Government.

By missing this opportunity, Coca-Cola made it look like it had something to hide and this also reflected negatively on its reputation.

The result of this stance wa...

July 6, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, House of Illustration, Marketing practice, Sponsorship News  No comments

This isn’t a one-way street of course. There’s a lot that sports can learn from the arts – for example creating unique experiences that reach desired audience and customer segments in a precise way that’s memorable and doesn’t suffer from ‘sponsorship clutter’ that often afflicts much bigger property types such as a premier league football club.

However, the arts sector needs to become much more commercially savvy in helping itself achieve anything like the success achieved by sports rights owners over the last 40 years that has generated billions in support of sports and entertainment that relies on sponsorship income for its existence.

Earlier this week, UK ar...

June 30, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, Marketing practice, The Art of Influencing and Selling  No comments

Retailers that simply try to appeal to shoppers during waking hours may be in for a shock, according to new research from the US by brand strategy consultants Vivaldi Partners Group.

There’s a new breed of consumer that can’t actually be reached through traditional marketing channels and marketers need to have deployed strategies in order to reach this group who are active at any time of day.

And it’s not enough to break your customer base down into groups according to age and gender – marketers need to build up the fullest possible picture of each customer in order to target them with highly individualised messages.

The days of traditional bricks and mortar, 9am to ...

June 23, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, High Impact Marketing that Gets Results, Marketing practice, Social marketing practice  No comments

CPM metrics could be a thing of the past as website owners look at delivering more than eye balls to advertisers.

The traditional metric of cost per 1,000 page views (CPM) relies on the advertiser paying the website owner in advance to showcase their ad on the website for a certain number of times that the web page is accessed by visitors to the site.

Typically, CPM rates ranged between £4-£10 per 1,000 page views and could be more for reaching niche audiences. Website owners that sell traditional advertising on their sites have to be prepared to show advertisers detailed reports of page view visits and click-through rates in order to cash in on the traffic to the site.

Adv...

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 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...

April 4, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, Marketing practice, Public Relations practice, Thought Leadership  No comments

According to American anthropologists Clyde Kluckhohn and Alfred Kroeber, culture “is a shared social blueprint for life – the constellation of values, assumptions, beliefs and behavioural norms that define a group of people.”

Well that’s the academic perspective for you, but how does this work in practice? Let’s say you have a prospective major customer in Germany and arrange to meet in Berlin over lunch.

Knowing how to read and speak German will be an obvious advantage when it comes to ordering lunch or entering into discussions but how will this serve you in being able to recognise the communication patterns of your guests that goes beyond the difference in la...

March 28, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle, Marketing practice, Public Relations practice  No comments

Product placement has been around as long as TV itself. One of the earliest examples of product placement was in 1949 when NBC launched America’s first daily TV news programme, the ‘Camel News Caravan’, featuring a newsreader smoking a Camel cigarette and a policy that banned footage of ‘no smoking’ signs and anyone puffing on a cigars, including Sir Winston Churchill!

Today, brand and product tie-ins are less brazen but equally effective as a weapon for achieving a brand positioning advantage over the competitors’ above-the-line PR and marketing efforts.

The James Bond film franchise is credited with having started the current fashion of placing well-known brand...

March 15, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, Marketing practice, Public Relations practice, Thought Leadership  No comments

At the end of last year, a new book by Steve Earl and Stephen Waddington hit the shelves and caused a bit of a stir. Brand Vandals was a polemic about the dangers facing any organisation as it struggles to manage its reputation in the face of determined vandals out to destroy it on social media.

“Media has become a two-way weapon. Nobody can control it. It’s anarchy.”

Assuming you didn’t suffer nervous shock or call the emergency services after reading the first chapter, the book goes on to describe a world where luckless PR managers are fighting an ever losing battle against brand vandalism...