Blog and News
How to get the vision back in your brand.
Does your brand know where it's going? More importantly, are you clear where you want it to go?When developing a brand or briefing a consultant, it's critical to consider what you want your brand to look like in, say, five years time, or more. Try not to focus only on...
Brand names and seven key decisions
Traps to avoid with your new brand name. Most startups spend way too much time and energy worrying about their brand name. Just take a look at the names of some of our leading brands and you’ll see that they are not significant in themselves. Their importance lies in...
Your brand doesn’t exist
In fact no brands exist… not even the most famous ones.Let’s look more closely at what that means. A brand is just what’s called a social construct. That means it's a concept that we, as a society, invent to help make sense of things. They are ideas, stories if you...
Nobody’s interested in your product or service.
Customers don’t care about your business - all they’re interested in is what it can do for them. You may be justifiably proud of a new product feature you’ve sweated over. That new system you’ve designed may seem really cool to you. But all the client wants to know is...
Do Marketers and Boards speak different languages?
In an excellent article in Catalyst, the Chartered Institute of Marketing magazine, Chris Daly (CEO of the CIM) suggests boards and marketers communicate in different languages. He considers whether this may limit marketers’ contribution to the business. Now, surely...
How to create marketing plans for uncertain times.
A new year should be the time for getting marketing plans and strategies in place for the year ahead. However, we live in uncertain times and many businesses are holding off planning. Political turmoil, global trade wars and financial instability cloud the view....
The postman knocks once more for direct mail.
Are we ready for the new age of direct mail? You may have also noticed an increase in direct mail received over recent months. Certainly my postman's been making more frequent visits. It was predicted Direct mail would enjoy a resurgence following the introduction of...
Video marketing – if it moves – shoot it
In my early days in advertising, before video marketing, we used to have a saying, “Nothing sells like TV.” It was true… and there was sound reasoning behind it. Firstly, the medium had tremendous reach, and of course, TV is a major medium. However, the overriding...
Argos, innovation – and intuition’s role
Marketing technology is steadily changing business' approach to innovation. The traditional approach was to take a creative idea, analyse, research, develop, commercialise and test throughly. Then, only when a significant understanding and probability of success could...
What happened to sustainable marketing?
Why is sustainability back on the marketing agenda? It seems like just a few years ago, sustainable marketing was a hot topic. Then things went very quiet for a while. I found this curious, as sustainability was increasingly being considered as a pillar of corporate...
When the hand of marketing should be felt but not seen – light-touch marketing
Marketing is a process – the effects should be apparent but not the process.You may find this a pretty obvious statement, and quite inoffensive. For the six or so decades of this still new art (or science?) of marketing, we have held such a truth to be self-evident....
Killer copywriting and how to speak your customers’ language
The web is still fundamentally a text-based medium so language matters. One simple thing can make or break an ad, post or mailer – ‘voice.’ In other words, not just what you say, but how you say it. We all use different voices in everyday life – when we speak to...