What is the difference between Mark-up and Margin?
Words are wonderful things, they allow us to communicate meaning. However, some words are easily interpreted in differing ways, making the shared understanding challenging, and sometimes the differences are exploited in a selling situation. One of the common "pea...
3 stage elevator pitch that works
Opportunities to deliver our elevator pitch often happen in social and unplanned situations, you just meet someone, and the automatic question is 'what do you do?' That is the opportunity for an elevator pitch, rather than just a polite response. You might...
7 steps to a certain sale
Forests have been denuded as 'experts' publish their complicated sales processes. Most have value coated in all sorts of hyperbole, jargon, psychological puffery, and sometimes just plain old mysticism. However, when you add a bit of plain common sense, the sales...
7 trends driving business in 2016.
Like everyone else who sees themselves as having a useful view of the train coming at us, I have again tried to articulate the things I see as important to businesses, particularly the smaller ones that make up my client base. Following are the outcomes of my assorted...
How did I do in 2015?
So, it is again New Years Day. January 1, 2016. Another year gone, but where? I hope 2015 was a good one for you, and that 2016 is better. For my part, I will keep on offering up my musings on the challenges facing small businesses in the hope that along the way some...
things I learnt, and relearnt, about marketing in 2015
The year has been a blur, they go faster as I get older, something I find disturbing. Rushing headlong towards the daisy bed seems illogical when there is so much left to do. I will be 64 in a few weeks, must be a song there somewhere, but it seems that the older I...
Can the government’s innovation initiative innovate us out of the funk?
Peter Drucker said something like "innovation is the only truly sustainable competitive advantage". Having just re-read his 1985 musings on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, after 20 or so years, the degree of his foresight is truly astonishing. It is great to finally...
The lesson from Nurofen’s leadership folly
Reckitt Benckiser did everything right, and they did everything wrong with their Nurofen brand. How can that be? The ACCC has now successfully prosecuted Reckitt Benckiser in the federal court for misleading consumers with their Nurofen brand of painkillers, requiring...
Small business beating the barriers of FMCG category management
Small business beating the barriers of FMCG category management One of the core challenges in category management is simply the way the term has been interpreted operationally. Let me explain. Category management is a data intensive game, the numbers count for...
The mindset change for small business success
The mindset change for small business success On one hand, digital tools offer small businesses the opportunity to look big, to compete with the big guys on a global stage. On the other, small businesses have the ability to seek out niches that are too small for large...