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Is your retail company innovative enough? Will you be left behind? Is it fad or fashion? How will you ever know? Strategic innovation places one retailer on top of another. People are always looking for different - what no-one else has. But then they want what everyone else has. It’s hard to keep up.

So your marketing for this year is pretty much done and dusted now… except for your last pre-Christmas campaigns over the next few weeks. So what then? Do you have a plan in place for talking to your customers in January, with a strategy that will take you through 2016?

Telling the right story at the right time is essential to a successful Marketing campaign, and the last thing you want is to be behind the eight-ball due to a lack of planning. Leaving it until you get back from holidays in January to think about your Marketing message means you will be well behind your competitors who have a strategy mapped out.

Here are my 3 top tips for getting ahead of the game with your Marketing for 2016…

The countdown is on and while we are all still enjoying the Spring Racing Carnival, there are a few large retailers who have already put together their Christmas displays and have started their Christmas marketing campaigns.

So what should you do? Do you start early because they have, or do you wait until it is closer to Christmas? Here is your retail marketing “TO DO” list to help you decide.

A lot of clients ask me about “Marketing Automation” because they’ve heard the buzzword and wonder if it’s something they should be doing.... and as with everything in technology nowadays it can be hard to keep up (especially if you’re a small business and marketing is not your area of expertise).

Marketing Automation is used extensively in the US retail market, but in Australia we are a little way behind. There is so much more that marketers could be doing with the technology - and early adopters in Australia will be streets ahead of the competition.

It’s crunch time for marketers.  No longer can marketing teams and their agencies get away with disregarding their organisational sustainability policies.  Any why do I think that?  Because we’ve had a few clangers lately. 

Remember the Telstra iPhone 6 ad, where the man opens the packaging and throws it away so that a crab becomes stuck in it?  Not a great example of environmental responsibility – and also a reinforcement of overt consumerism. 

In Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, he popularised the theory of The Two-Step Flow of Communication (Lazarsfeld & Katz, 1955)¹ by explaining how innovation and information is spread in a two-step flow, from mass media to influencers - and then onto the masses via the influencers. Gladwell renamed this theory ‘The Law of The Few’ and colourfully reworded it as, "The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts (the ability to influence others)".² If you can overlook the blatant plagiarism, Gladwell must be congratulated for bringing the principles of the original theory back into the mainstream almost 50 years after its original publication, at a time when understanding influencers is more important than ever (if you're in marketing or politics).

‘Every risk is worth taking as long as it’s for a good cause and contributes to a good life’ Sir Richard Branson

It’s been a while since my last post when I decided to ditch my un-planned plan of travelling, chilling out, having some ‘me time’ (as the self help books would put it) and taking a breath. Let me tell you; I’ve been taking a lot of deep breaths in the last couple of months (into a paper bag at times) and it’s not that I haven’t thought about posting it’s just, well, I haven’t quite known how to articulate what’s been going on.