nickshanagher

Three leader columns in the Guardian, the Times and the Financial Times demonstrate the battlefield upon which policy decisions are made as the UK government last week put plans for plain packaging of tobacco on ice. First the Guardian, which is aligned closely with the health lobby on tobacco issues. The Guardian believes that the government has been won over by big business (tobacco companies) on a public health issue. When Andrew Lansley was this government's health secretary in 2010 he said the evidence was clear that packaging helps to recruit smokers, the paper says. His government's suggestion that it should wait and see what happens in Australia is disingenuous, it says. Instead, people should think about Lynton Crosby, a lobbyist working closely with David Cameron (as leader of the Tory party rather than the country) and a supplier to BAT. The Guardian does not point out that the government's public consultation on the subject has not finished and the Depar...

The best moment in my interview with Terri Sjodin, who teaches many of the world’s top corporations how to sell persuasively, is when she smiles at me and asks to hear my “elevator speech".   My mind literally goes blank. The author of Small Message, Big Impact , her new book on how to craft powerful messages that persuade people to listen to you, has thrown the gauntlet at me. There was nowhere to hide. I had just told her how I had used her book to write out my three minute speech to open the Local Shop Summit. She listened patiently to my pitch, thought for a moment, and said: “I bet you had an illustration in your mind of an independent who really capitalised on your ideas and has taken them to the bank.” I could swear she was reading my mind. I blushed and nodded. “So you should open with this story,” she said. “Start out by saying: ‘Let me open the conference by telling you a great story with a happy ending.’ So the audience will say to themselves: ‘He is goi...

A colleague of mine showed me a flier that Mike Greene had used to promote his book - Failure Breeds Success - and I thought that his book looked like a useful modern version of Think and Grow Rich, the iconic self-help book from Napoleon Hill. Greene is well known in the news and convenience industry through his leadership of consultancy him! Starting out working as a paperboy for a newsagent, he went on to become a Martin McColl manager before stints at Spar, Cirkle K, Shell and Jet. I have heard Mike speak and been in the same room as him often but we have never spoken. However, I had a hunch that his self-help book might appeal to business-minded retailers working in our trade right here and right now. My hunch was right. Failure Breeds Success is an accessible version of Think and Grow Rich. It is steeped in Mike's personal journey, which is through the news and convenience trade to millionaire status. He gives you a road map to success - a map you can hand to a...

Sometimes local shops are ahead of the game when it comes to shopper trends. And sometimes they are not. As a general rule, people don’t expect to be marketed to by independent shopkeepers. But there are many exceptions. This column is for the exceptions: Those retailers who are always searching for great products to share with their shoppers. But it is also a challenge for those who don’t push the boundaries of their assortment of products. Mike Brehme is an entrepreneur that I had never heard of until last month. He spent 23 years building up the tea brand Clipper to sales of £50 million before he sold it in 2007. Along the way he pioneered the UK market for green tea, Fairtrade tea, and organic hot drinks including herbal and fruit infusions. For most of the time since he sold Clipper he has been working on a new product, a hot drink that is not tea or coffee and that will sell better than fruit teas. This spring, in London, he unveiled FruitBroo, a range of “insanel...

There is an amazing fact near the start of Decoded, a new book from marketer Phil Barden. The average person takes 1.7 seconds to process the information in an advertisement in a magazine. But this does not really matter because all good marketing needs is this 1.7 seconds. People are programmed to respond quickly to the hundreds of thousands of things they “see” every day. If the marketing is right for what we are looking for, we will find the products we need. Even if we make mistakes, as we all do, all the time. But if we “were to reflectively think about every purchase decision in the supermarket, it would take so long to do our shopping that we would starve to death.” Barden’s work builds on the field of behavioural economics pioneered by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, whose brilliant book Thinking Fast and Slow demonstrates that the way people behave is not as economists would like to think. In a chapter on optimising the path to purchase, Barden shows how good m...

Walter Robb, co-CEO of Whole Foods, provides good insight into its success secrets in an interview with Fortune, just published, that retailers should read. In a company with 78,000 staff members, it says voluntary staff turnover is 9 per cent compared to an industry average of 100 per cent plus. At departmental manager level it is 3 per cent. What makes this possible? "Everyone belongs to a team. Labour is a fixed cost not a variable cost. If a team can generate revenue that exceeds a budgeted margin between the revenue and the labour cost, they share in the gain. Every 30 days it is in their paycheck. If they build sales or save costs, the productivity they create is shared with them. On average in the last year it was over $1 an hour in their paychecks from gain sharing, which they created through their own efforts," Robb told Fortune's Geoff Colvin. There is an important principle in here that you can use in your business. You need to operate with discipline ...

Rumours of a tie-up between Palmer & Harvey and Costcutter had been circulating in the industry for more than a year and the logic of the alliance is explained in a short marketing booklet. Together they have set up a not-for-profit Buyco to negotiate the best possible terms. The duo are promising existing customers even better prices than ever before. Will this happen? There is a good chance if the new retail arm can organise its disciplines and demonstrate that it is creating new purchase opportunities for suppliers. What independent retailers have to be realistic about is that Tesco has a six per cent margin advantage because it controls around a third of the market. Simply lumping all their invoices together does not create the value, working collaboratively to meet shopper needs does. P&H has handed over all its symbol group convenience operations to Costcutter as part of this deal. Thus its Mace and SuperShop members will be managed by the team at Costcutter. P...