Why is consistency important?

I’m amazed at how many small businesses I come across who don’t pay attention to their professional image. There is at least one company I know that use one version of their logo on their shop front, a slight variation of this on their vans, and a completely different style in their printed promotions. Their reason for doing this? The fact that the sign-writer created the shop front logo – and the person who put the ad in the magazine designed it for them, and they didn’t know which font it was.

Why does it matter?

Complaints can be good for business

I recently had such a good experience following a complaint, I’m going to tell you all about it.  This was a textbook case of dealing with it well.

Recently though, I noticed that I was getting pink smears all over the surfaces that I was wiping. And when you’ve got cream kitchen cupboards, that’s not good.

How can small businesses use LinkedIn as part of their marketing activity?

Whether or not a small business should use LinkedIn for marketing depends on what their objective is. It also depends on what type of business they run.

One of the benefits of LinkedIn is that it can showcase an individual’s career background and experience. Generally speaking, if you want to get on in the world, it’s worth having an easy to view summary of your skills, your career history and a couple of good testimonials … and LinkedIn does that job very nicely. 

Boden has a stroke of genius

Last night I went to a Boden clothes party. This is something new. Boden have been selling clothes via their colourful, quirky catalogue for almost 20 years, and in 1999 introduced a user-friendly website so you can buy online.  They even have the odd shop (well two actually).  But generally it’s hard for most of us to see and feel the clothes before buying them. 

So the prospect of seeing them “in person” before buying them was very attractive, and the fact I could do so at a friend’s house with a glass of wine – even better!  This is why I think it’s a stroke of genius on Boden’s part…

Marketing planning is like a vegetable plot

My husband is a keen gardener, and spends much of the winter collecting packets of seeds and planning what he’s going to plant when. It struck me that this is not dissimilar to marketing planning. In order to generate results you need to plant some seeds. But much like gardening, you need to spread your activity out over a number of months to ensure a sustained outcome.