Attend as my guest – CIM event exploring Artificial Intelligence

Posted on September 12, 2017 by nigeldavis

No one can have failed to notice the sheer number of stories that seem to make their way onto the front pages almost every day. Personally, I love seeing technology evolve but from an ethical perspective I do wonder what this will do to the job market and perhaps more importantly, what it’ll do with our own sanity if the human race isn’t kept busy. Are we simply going to re-train people (assuming there’s work for them to re-train in of course), or are most of us going to become shareholders in businesses and generate our livelihoods from the profits these firms generate? I’m wondering more than ever now because in the last few weeks’ I’ve been surprised about the … Read More >

Marketer vs Marketing Leader!

Posted on June 2, 2017 by nigeldavis

We’ve been in a situation in marketing for a long time now where most people’s understanding of marketing is at the most basic level, so basic in fact that thousands upon thousands of firms who recruit ‘marketers’ tend to do so to fulfil a simple communications exercise with external stakeholders. Consequently marketing is seen as being a task that truly anyone in an organisation can fulfil and consequently they prefer to leave it to others. However, professional marketing is for me one of the single most important tasks within any organisation and it’s only right to explore why I believe this to be the case. According to “The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader” by Thomas Barta and Patrick Barwise, … Read More >

Insider advice for promoting a new event

Posted on May 3, 2017 by nigeldavis

Much like the conductor of an orchestra, you have to juggle lots of elements to ensure that come the date of the event, everything is in place. There are lots of individual component parts that require a lot of thought, time and money. Obviously an event isn’t an event without attendees so the events timing becomes an important consideration. Choose a date too soon and the people/companies invited are likely to have existing commitments, select a date too far away and you could fail to generate interest at the outset. So you’ll need to make allowances so that your own marketing will have a sustained effect. Today’s marketing environment has numerous channels for generating interest in your event. Social media … Read More >

Just Good Old Fashioned Customer Service

Posted on March 27, 2017 by nigeldavis

Businesses, particularly those in very competitive industries will often be encouraged to focus on the elements of marketing’s 7P’s model in order to stand out from the crowd. These 7 P’s are: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence; but each of these can be very complex areas that require a lot of examination and subsequent investment. Just twelve months on from the purchase of my wife’s German car we’ve returned it to the main agent for its first service. It was bought from a very large brand whose franchise is owned by a long-standing British firm which can easily ‘tick the boxes’ on five of our seven P’s. But the problems we have encountered with the remaining … Read More >

Shared objectives require defining for success

Posted on February 18, 2017 by nigeldavis

I’ve been running my consultancy for many years now, 14 to be precise and during this time we’ve been lucky enough to work with many wonderful people. I used to think that this was just good luck on our part until recently when I started to question this element we refer to as ‘luck’. In fact I recall one business owner saying to me during a car journey that “the harder he worked, the luckier he seemed to get”. I hadn’t heard this before and so it struck me as being very insightful. But since that time I’ve thought about this even further. Take for example my comment about being ‘lucky enough’ to work with many wonderful people which really … Read More >

It’s time to treat your data much more seriously

Posted on December 9, 2016 by nigeldavis

In October I wrote a blog about the introduction of new data regulations that will come into force for UK and EU businesses on the 25th May 2018. If you’ve not read it and you don’t know what this is all about, I’d recommend that you do as it should help to reassure you what needs to be done to limit your risk as a business and as a company director/data controller. It will also help you appreciate the associated risks of buying in any consumer data, namely fines imposed of up to 20 million Euros. I for one am personally delighted to see the new regulations coming into force, but I can also see that it will be quite … Read More >

GDPR – Ignorance is no defence

Posted on October 28, 2016 by nigeldavis

If you’ve heard about this and are already preparing your business congratulations, if not then you really need to be aware of the changes coming our way that will most likely affect all businesses in the UK in 2018. So what is GDPR? It stands for ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ and it is designed to bring all European countries into line on matters of personal and commercial data protection enforcing such policies on all member states (surprisingly not all have robust policies). Of course it’s long overdue bearing in mind how much has changed with managing personal data since the Data Protection Act of 1998 was brought into being in the UK. Many consumers are in the dark about how … Read More >

Stuffocation – a marketing man’s moral dilemma

Posted on September 28, 2016 by nigeldavis

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of ‘Stuffocation’ but I first came across it in 2015 whilst hearing it discussed on BBC Radio 2’s Chris Evans breakfast show. Mr Evans was interviewing James Wallman, the author of a book with the same title. James Wallman’s view and I suspect the view of quite a few people, lies in the fundamental question, what exactly are our little lives all about? We live, work, breathe and die on this planet and yet through our work we are driven to buy material things that make us feel happy, temporarily at least. That desire to do better than our neighbours or our friends and to generate pride amongst our family. That belief that … Read More >

Leaders of Today and Tomorrow

Posted on July 22, 2016 by nigeldavis

I remember a few short years ago coming across several businesses who told me about the problems they encountered when offering internships, or student work experience as it was known then. They complained about everything the students did; how they didn’t dress appropriately, that they didn’t speak to customers properly, that their time keeping was poor, pretty much everything in fact. At the time I remember thinking that my sympathies were with the employer, after all, here are a handful of business owners who are trying desperately to promote their businesses during challenging times and now they have this to cope with? But several years later I’m fairly sure that the majority of these failures lay at their door. Over the … Read More >

With our help our SME business clients have BIG ideas!

Posted on May 5, 2016 by nigeldavis

I spend a fair amount of my time helping SME companies develop growth strategies. These strategies require me to review their markets and competition, products and services, systems, skills and of course their staff roles and capabilities to position the business for their short and long-term goals. Yet in SME’s (particularly of a certain size), it can be all too easy to lose sight of one’s own staff when your customers and competitors, products and services can take up so much of a management team’s time, so we help by ‘joining-up-the-dots’. A large percentage of SME’s recruit staff, either by word-of-mouth, recruitment agency, advertisement, networking or promotion through the ranks and a few take this further and bring in apprentices, especially … Read More >