First Direct tagged posts

November 21, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

It is 50 years to the week that President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Among the many black and white TV news clips of speeches made by JFK that I’ve been watching this week, one sentence in particular struck a chord with me:

“In each of us there’s a private hope and dream which, if fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone.”

That may sound like a lofty ideal. However, I sincerely believe that as marketers, we all need the conviction to want to make a positive difference for the organisation or enterprise that we are part of and serve. Nothing less will do.

To create something valuable out of nothing more than a compelling vision, or...

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...