By all accounts we’re standing by a cliff-edge, about to head into a global economic recession. It’s no surprise that businesses are looking for ways to mitigate the impending damage. For most, that manifests as a choice between either reducing costs, or increasing efficiencies. …

Designing and executing effective marketing programs is a tough gig at the best of times. Today’s marketer faces a wide range of emerging strategic and operational challenges. …

Part of marketing’s role has always been concerned with delivering information to people. Today, it would seem marketing is more concerned with looking for ways of extracting information from them. The advent of digital advertising, a decade or so ago, provided marketers with an exciting opportunity. Being able to deliver…

There’s a danger in remaining overly confined within your own industry’s thought bubble. Reading and listening to peers too much can cloud your view of your job, as well as the industry as a whole. It pulls you in a direction that ultimately does more harm than good. For example…

At a geopolitical level, there’s evidence to support the notion that democratically-governed countries produce higher levels of innovation than autocracies. But does that hold true when we’re talking about industries, businesses serving those industries, or departments within those businesses? I’m not so sure. You can’t help falling over organizations of…

Most of my working day is spent talking with business owners or marketing managers. Subjects can range anywhere from whether I think they should redesign their website to generate more traffic, to why their Facebook ads are underperforming. But the single biggest inquiry we get as an agency is from…

In the old days, the role of marketing within an organization was more straightforward. Its confines were clearer too, especially against a backdrop of B2B sales. Today, truly effective marketing needs to expand into previously-restricted departments such as Sales, Support, IT, and even Finance. …

None of us know what the next 12 months have in store in terms of social distancing, mask-wearing, or vaccines. Regardless of that, whatever you previously thought marketing was must now change. Thirteen years ago, when we launched our agency, part of my time was spent convincing business owners of…

It doesn’t matter whether you call it an RFP (Request For Proposal), RFQ (Request for Quotation), or RFI (Request For Information). Using a rigid, pre-determined checklist as the basis for selecting a marketing services provider is one of the worst things a business can do. For many businesses, the process…