Siobhan got back from her holiday in Greece last week, she went to Agassi in Zante and ended up staying in the same apartments my husband I went to a few years ago.  Before she went I told her about this great little restaurant on the main street in Agassi called Ethnic which did great grilled meat and sea foods. In fact it was the only restaurant I remembered from that holiday and they had a great marketing strategy, which Siobhan confirmed they were still using and was still working. It’s quite simple but it ticks a lot of marketing boxes, and it is as follows: Read more…

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What does cooking a family meal have to do with positioning your products and services. Well quite  a lot really. I realised quite a long time ago that the name you give to certain meals influences how it is received by your target audience i.e my children.

Take my 12 year old, vegetable phobic daughter, no matter how hard I have tried over the years to promote healthy living, she has turned her nose up at many a meal that I have put before her. Until I tried a new approach a few years ago, I simply renamed the food that I made and cut the vegetables up a bit smaller. So… Read more…

I was starting to write a post on social media and the use of Web 2.o when I came across this blog post from Chris Brogan. It is a great article and gives you 50 ideas for how social media could help you improve your marketing. If you are new to social media it is a bit technical in places, but it includes some good ideas such as making sure your blog posts use relevant key words and how video can make a big difference to your search engine rankings. To take a look at what Chris has to say visit the article here. http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ways-marketers-can-use-social-media-to-improve-their-marketing/.

For more articles on this blog about Social Media take a look at

Social Media FAQ

Twitter for Beginners

An email came into my Inbox a few days ago from John Alexander. I subscribe to his Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Tips which gives you lots of tips for how to optimise your website. This most recent email told me all about new types of search engines, that display information visually rather than in a long list. These search engines all you to view the search results in different views so you can look at the search results the way you want to.  I took a look at them and I thought they were quite good and I played around with displaying the results in different ways. You can look at each website as a screen shot, or as a cloud of results, in fact there are 15 different ways to take a look at the information in Viewzi.

Not all of us look at information in the same way, so these new search engines might just be an easier way of sifting through all the results you get on Google, as an alternative now and again.

Take a look at John’s blog to find out more, he explains it much better than I could

Viewzi and Quintura Visual Search - A New Way To Experience Search Engine Results  http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/visual.html

I received a piece of direct mail today from a printing company - who will remain nameless.  It was a really great example of how not to do direct mail,  and it went something like this…I have changed the names and details to spare blushes, but kept all the formatting and grammar errors. Read more…

Next time you run an advert or have a direct link to your website, make sure you create a specific landing page that relates to the advert or information. For example, if you are offering a free
guide, then take people directly to the page about the guide; www.brightermarketing.com/marketing-book, not your home page. It is vitallyimportant that visitors don’t have to spend time trying to find the information they are looking for, so here are just a few tips Read more…

Here is a video from Ted that you might find interesting which is all about marketing Spaghetti Sauce, by Malcolm Gladwell the author of the recent book The Tipping Point. This video was recorded in 2004 but still rings true, it’s about how asking your target audience what they want may not give you the straight answers you are looking for.  It is about how you need to delve a little deeper to find out what consumers really want to make them happy, take a look you’ll be suprised and what makes them choose the brands and types of brands they do.

I was just finishing a marketing plan for a client this morning which included a whole section on direct mail. Although it’s not right for all companies in this case it was, and I had included some different mailing ideas that were different from the normal letter and brochure which normally gets filed under B for Bin. Feeling the need for inspiration I took a break to look at one of my favourite marketing blogs,  Drew’s Marketing Minute,  and saw a blog post on a direct mail that he had received which was a chocolate covered grasshopper in a eye catching mailing envelope. To see the direct mail take a look at  www.drewsmarketingminute.com/2009/05/a-little-grasshopper-told-me.html . It was for a telecoms company and whilst they missed some key points such as including their brand etc the package got through to Drew, he opened it and what’s more it got lots of people talking about it in the office.

All of which got me thinking - in the last month I haven’t received one piece of innovative direct mail. Read more…

I wrote a blog post back in November called the Mummy Brand all about how my eldest daughter had dropped her mum now that she was at high school and how I had been relegated to taxi driver and general tidier upper. I remember how she used to hold my hand and how she used to skip and jump when she walked and how she would rely on me for more than just a lift somewhere. I had failed to notice the subtle changes that had been taking place and lost touch with the way teens and pre-teens communicate. Well I am glad to report that with a bit of training and re-acquaintance with my target market, I am finding it much easier to talk to her and she to me.

I know all about Bebo, slang on MSN, I can decipher her text messages and send them back to her  in the same language. It’s not perfect but I am getting there, and she is also trying to find out more about what I do for a living, even though she would never ever want me to come into school to talk about it. We even went shopping together in the school holidays and got on OK, she even picked out some outfits for me, that didn’t make me look like a teenager.

So what’s the moral to this ongoing saga, don’t loose touch with your target market, understand what it’s like to live in their world, and if they prefer to text you or communicate via email do that. Keep an eye on what’s happening in your industry and keep communicating with them. As with growing kids, once the communication stops, that’s where the problems can start.

Seth Godin has an interesting take on the new search engine that Microsoft are planning to develop and launch. The new search engine will be called BING (But It’s Not Google) and the marketing budget alone is said to be $100m. Seth wonders why they are spending this amount of money on trying to emulate something that already exists. A thought echoed by Al and Laura Reiss in their book The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, which talks about being first into a market.

You always remember the first into the market and the brand name normally becomes a woven into the language. For example, Hoover, Kleenex, Sellotape and Google it. You tend to remember firsts such as the first man on the moon, first woman to fly the Atlantic and so on. You don’t tend to remember seconds. As Seth points out

“Google is not seen as broken by many people, and a hundred million dollars trying to persuade us that it is, is money poorly spent. In times of change, the rule is this:

Don’t try to be the ‘next’. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new”

So don’t try to simply make your product or service better, innovate come up with something new. It doesn’t have to a new invention just think about how you can modify or merge what you have already into something new. Be first into the market and take a look at our recent blog post on marketing innovation.

Link to Seth’s Blog article http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/the-next-google.html

This short blog post is about how developing a marketing plan is only half the challenge, acting on it is where the real work comes in.

You see marketing plans will never fail, how can they? They are beautiful creations with lofty words, precise diagrams, financial projections, matrices and positioning statements. A marketing plan will never fail, their downfall is in their execution… Read more…

When it comes to innovation and creativity, you don’t always have to come up with completely new ideas often it’s just about thinking about how you can combine existing products or services into something new. Len Kendall posted an interesting blog post about Rollasoles, soft comfortable ballet pump type shoes that you can buy out of vending machines in night clubs up and down the country. It is a long time since I was out dancing all night, but I remember in the days that I used to try and stuff my size 8s into a pair of high heels I would hobble home, and on occasion be in so much pain that I would just walk home bare foot. I think I would have gladly paid a fiver to get some soft shoes to wear to get me home.

As Len points out… Read more…

When you write your next email, brochure, proposal or advertising campaign, stop and think. Has it been written with your audience in mind, does it connect with them and more importantly how much jargon does it contain?

Here are just some examples of how using over the top language can
alienate your readers.

“Top leadership has helicoptered this vision”,

by which they reallymean…

…”The management team have decided the way forward”.

“Added value is the keystone to exponentially accelerating profit curves”

by which they really mean…

“Lets grow sales & profits by offering more of what the customer wants”.

“We need to dimensionalizse this management initiative”,

by whichthey really mean…

…”Let’s make a plan”

If you want more examples of jargon take a look at
www.johnsmurf.com/jargon.htm to make sure you don’t include them in your copy.

Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so, which is why Facebook, Twitter and a whole host of connective “tribal” sites have become so popular. This video gives you an insight into why people need to belong and why it is important, particularly in consumer marketing.

My 12 year old daughter is writing adverts in her English class for a new brand of sweets they have designed. She has told me all about how they have defined their target market and designed a poster to advertise the new sweets with a great strap line that makes the reader find out more about the new sweets. I was impressed by their efforts and was amazed by what a young mind can do without the years of baggage about how marketing should be done is carried around by most of us.

However, she wasn’t so sure what she had done was “right” and asked me “What is marketing? Is there any secret advertising stuff I should know about that I can use to make the poster better?” Read more…

The following report from Sky News says it all really. The big advert agencies are using viral marketing to great effect. However, you don’t have to have a big budget to harness the power of viral marketing. We launched our book The Brighter Marketing Bible, just by using email viral marketing - to find out how we did it take a look at  http://brightermarketing.com/blog/category/book-launch/

And to find out how the big boys do it, take a look at the following report on viral marketing by Sky.

BBC2 had a very thought provoking programme on last night about how small the world really is and that if we all just made a little bit more effort we could get in contact with some amazing people. It was all about the six degrees of separation. If you didn’t see it take a look at the BBC iPlayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00kdtvv/Six_Degrees_of_Separation/

Most people know about the six degrees of separation i.e. we are only separated by six people or six steps to someone else here on planet earth.  Many people thought it was just an urban myth but they weren’t. Experiments done in the 1960’s by Stanley Milgram asked 300 random people to get a package to a stockbroker in Boston.  They couldn’t send it direct, they could only send the package to someone who they thought might know the stockbroker. Amazing 29% of the packages reached the stockbroker through 6 connections or less.

A similar experiment was conducted in the UK 2003 when 100 random people had to get a letter to an events organiser in Cheltenham. This experiment by Prof. Richard Wiseman had a similar outcome and proved that we are much closer than we think to people we want to get in touch with. Read more…

I read an interesting article in one of the Sunday Times supplements this weekend. It was by Rosie Boycott who had been the Editor of the Daily Express back in 2000, but due to a series of events has ended up as a pig farmer and has never been happier. But what on earth has this got to do with marketing you may ask? Quite a lot actually. Her story is all about who you are and how you run your business, which ultimately can have a massive effect on the way you position and market your business.

To precis Rosie’s story, she was a high powered Fleet Street Editor, who found herself out of  job in 2001. Thinking this would be good for her as she had been tied to a desk for the past 16 years,  she set about trying to enjoy her “time off”, but in reality had no idea what to do with all this time she now had available.  As she says Read more…

I have just finished reading a blog post by Drew McLellan which I really enjoyed and which links well with a post I wrote last week about marketing creativity and the fact that we are all creatures of habit.

Drew wrote about the fact that on a recent walk with his dog,  she kept her nose to the ground and missed all the animals and birds that were moving and flying around her. More importantly his dog was so engrossed with sniffing the ground beneath her she walked right into a patch of prickly brambles. Read more…

Here is a short and simple way of planning your marketing; it is just a five step process and can give you the basis for any marketing plan you want to create.

1. Where are you now?
What marketing have you done, what’s worked, what hasn’t.

2. Where do you want to go?
What do you want to achieve with your company? What are your goals? Who do you need to beat?

3. How you might get there?
List all the marketing activities that could help you achieve your company goals and be precise about the type of people and companies you want to target.

4. Which way is best?
Assess all your marketing activities and decide which are most suitable. Prioritise them, which are the most important, which ones will help you get where you are going.

5. How can you ensure arrival?
Measure the success of your marketing campaigns and ensure you make changes to make sure that they are taking you towards what you want to achieve for your company.

It’s a simple process but it works.

We are all creatures of habit and it can play havoc with marketing creativity and generating new ideas. We all tend to do the same things every day and often don’t stop to think about what we are doing and why we are doing it.

We recently undertook a marketing creativity workshop and we asked the participants what they did each day. It looked something like this… Read more…