Marketing Intelligence by Iain Johnston

London is famous for many things. The city is a cosmopolitan mix of people and is world famous for the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, the River Thames, and red London buses. And black taxi cabs.
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While I understand the merits and environmental efficiency of public transport, I must declare a prejudice: [...]

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My son is about to start his GCSEs.
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[Just let me pause at that point while all over 40s lament the demise of O' Levels, and how everyone these days get A-star GCSEs for just turning up to school.]
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He’s taking maths, like everyone else, because it is compulsory. Like long hair, l33t speak and  not [...]

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Last year I wrote in this column about how your own staff can determine whether your multi-million pound investment in a marketing communications campaign succeeds or fails.
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I wrote about how the brilliantly trained Virgin Trains staff can live and breathe their brand and keep passengers smiling, even when the rail network is in chaos, the [...]

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When times are tough, most businesses scrutinise every item of expenditure. When times get really hard, this scrutiny becomes intense, with every line of the profit and loss account forced to justify itself in terms of payback, return on investment, and direct support for revenues.
We see this in our clients’ businesses, with pressures on budgets [...]

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In marketing businesses we are used to working hard to delight and impress our clients. Many are the weekends when our people agonise over some fine tuning of the creative work, or endlessly brainstorm and challenge a proposed approach. We talk all the time about our passion for our work and our clients. Our recent [...]

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Is there a “right” noise level in the office?
On the one hand, I do understand that sometimes we all need a bit of quiet time to concentrate and other people’s music can be annoying.
On the other, I am used to working in busy offices with energy, noise and lively creative debate the norm rather than the [...]

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Still, the prize for the most cringe-worthy moment of The Apprentice so far goes to the original girls team back near the start, when pitching their canapé menu to the client for an evening reception. Unfortunately, Kate who was pitching the food ideas (who has otherwise been pretty good so far) had no clue about [...]

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No I can’t hold it in. I have to get something else off my chest. I’ve had a couple of weeks off, but can’t resist some more Apprentice stuff.
These candidates give up weeks of their lives to prepare for, get selected and then actually participate in the programme. They agonise over CVs and make short [...]

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Once again our new friends for a few weeks on the Apprentice haven’t disappointed. Only a few weeks in and we already have some new lows of embarrassment. Of course the losers nearly always fail for the same reason – they get their costs too high - but this last week we had the delights [...]

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Lovely, really topical, a great April Fool’s story in Brand Republic, an otherwise respected gathering of current market news. Pigeons will be guided by some patented US military technology to deliver marketing messages in London. Great fun. And the technology is called “BYRD”. Priceless.
Still, in a city braced for disruption and chaos with the arrival of [...]

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