Taking Your Place In The Difference Economy

Whole Foods launched it’s first national and TV marketing campaign in 35 years on the back of losing 30% of its value in just six months. The company has been losing market share to chains like Walmart who are now stocking once hard to find sustainable and organic produce and selling it cheaper. There are…

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Getting Your Message ‘Out There’

When I was fifteen it cost fifty pence to go a see U2 play live to a tiny audience in the function room of the Rathfarnham Inn. A group of girls from my school who were die hard fans and too young to get into a pub at night applied three layers of eyeliner, half…

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The Best Marketing In The World

It’s easy to know why the features you built into your products and services are important, but it takes a particular skill to understand and communicate why they should matter to people. The best marketing in the world doesn’t remind people how great the company is or how many features have been added to the…

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Showing Up For Humans, Not Just For Google

I want to send some flowers to a friend a few suburbs away, of course I could deliver them myself, but there is something magical about the unexpected arrival of flowers that means I want to have them delivered. And so I turn to Google. After 20 minutes I find myself on page ten feeling…

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The Misleading Advantage

The little gelato place down the road from us is dying. For three years straight they were the only good enough ice cream place in the boat harbour. The lack of competition meant that they could steadily increase their prices from $3.80 per scoop to $5.80 while continuing to staff the store with young, casual,…

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My New Book—Marketing: A Love Story

My new book is here. You can buy it now on Amazon in paperback and in Kindle. I’ve wanted to find a way to juxtapose the concepts of marketing and love in a book for a long time. I like to think that even if you never opened the book, just owning it—seeing it on…

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The Two Approaches To Marketing

All marketing uses two basic approaches. When I was growing up and maybe when you were too, marketers used ‘The Influence Method’. 1. The Influence Method Make a product. Create an advertising campaign, jingle or tagline to persuade people to want whatever you are selling. Increase sales. Make more products. Buy more ads. Rinse and…

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Efficiency, Quality, Value And Soul

A new public hospital is opening in Perth this week and along with cutting edge medical facilities patients can expect a state-of-the-art “free-roaming food delivery robots”. Our local newspaper reported that, “The 300kg AGVs will deliver up to 2200 meals a day, directly to wards without human intervention, once they leave the kitchen.” The theory…

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Make Things People Want

Marketing means different things to different people. To some businesses it’s about Facebook engagement, to others it’s all about analytics or SEO, advertising or PR. If you’ve got the budget it could be a glossy image of Hugh Jackman—your 18K red gold watch, which has been “Crafted for New Heights” peeking from under his freshly…

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Close, Closer, Closest

Twenty years ago geography mattered. When there was one grocer in every suburb there was always enough business to go round. Close was an advantage. It’s easy to believe that because digital has dissolved borders, that it has simultaneously diluted advantages. But being close has taken on a whole new meaning. Closer has become more…

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