Thesis editing ... sorted
Join our community
  • EduPreneur Services International
    • Mentoring & coaching
  • Index of services
    • Tutoring
    • Entrepreneur? >
      • Go Digital
      • Online consultancy
      • Just Managing Blog
    • Education services
  • Shop Your Way to Success Blog
  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy

The Great British Cheese Festival

27/4/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
The Rummer Tavern where I sat sipping
Festivals are a special kind of market and I saw this in action at the Great British Cheese Festival in Cardiff, Wales, in 2010.

That autumn afternoon, I sheltered in a timber-lined 18th century tavern, the Rummer, opposite Cardiff’s landmark medieval castle.

Outside, people hurried past in the blustery streets or waited for buses, heading home after a busy working day. Next door, they paused in the arcades, picking up items for the evening, or maybe gifts for special occasions.

‘I wonder what they’re buying,’ I mused, over a pint of Hereford Pale Ale from the Wye Valley Brewery. ‘Cheese, probably,’ glancing at the placards outside the castle across the road.

But the cheese exhibits were only part of the festival. When I arrived next day it was about 11am and clear, also unseasonably warm.

​The queue wasn’t that long yet and the crowds not that intense, although they would develop to much more of a bustle within hours. The first thing I encountered wasn’t a cheese exhibit at all, it was a pork stall.

​Next week, inside the festival.

0 Comments

Big day at the shops

23/4/2017

1 Comment

 
Picture
Kent Lambert of Luscious Men's Grooming Products, Redcliffe Jetty Markets. Picture: JOHN COKLEY
Big day at the shops today. We met Kent Lambert and his beard at the Redcliffe Jetty Markets (above) and viewed the crafts of the Colombian and Panamanian Embera Chami tribe.

We also discovered the (relatively) new premises of REWIND retro and vintage shop at Sandgate (see gallery below).

And we continue our extracts from Shopping News about the economic value of shopping.

For every shopper, there are also sales people. In the US, there were about 4.5 million retail sales jobs in 2008, of a total labour force of 139 million people, and these were mostly in clothing and clothing accessories stores, department stores, building material and supplies dealers, motor vehicle and parts dealers, and general merchandise stores such as warehouse clubs and ‘supercenters’.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported there were an extra 156,500 self-employed retail salespersons. In Australia, more than 10 percent of the workforce has a job in the retail trade, and the top 10 jobs by volume among them are: sales assistant (general), retail manager, checkout operator and office cashier, shelf filler, pharmacy sales assistant, retail supervisor, motor vehicle and vehicle parts salesperson, store person, purchasing and supply logistics clerk, and motor mechanic.

In the UK, according to the British Retail Consortium ‘retailing is at the heart of our towns, cities and neighbourhoods’: 

One in every eight households has someone who works in retail and with 60 billion visits by consumers every year, retail plays a unique role in listening to and leading our communities.

How to make sense of all this? In the years I have spent travelling and shopping around the world and reading about shops, restaurants, tourism, marketing techniques and manufacturing, the key things which have stood out are: (1) how we get to the shop, (2) what we do inside the shop, and (3) what happens next.

In these three big categories we will keep in mind where the shop is located and how it looks and feels to the customer, including signage; how each product is made, packaged, labelled and priced; how stock is selected and acquired by the store ‘buyer’; how inventory is stored and displayed in the shop; the promises which are made to the customer before a purchase is made; crucially, how the money changes hands; and how those promises to the customer are fulfilled. 

If you are in any of the disciples of marketing, merchandising, and consumer behaviour, you’re tearing out your hair right about now, screaming: ‘There’s so much more!’ You’d be correct, generally speaking. But for the current project of learning lessons from shopping, these three will get us started.

More next week ...

1 Comment

Why shopping matters

12/4/2017

2 Comments

 
April 12: More people spend more of their days buying and selling than in practically any other occupation. We’re all either looking to buy or pitching to sell. In monetary terms, the number and worth of all the small buy-sell transactions that happen every minute in our everyday lives outweigh the number and worth of all the big ones that happen in Oval Offices, Cabinet Rooms and stock exchanges. 
     
In most countries, buying and selling – referred to as retail sales – is what’s called a ‘main economic indicator’ and tells you how a country’s economic health is standing. In Australia, for instance, monthly retail turnover in January 2009 stood at slightly more than $19 billion, although it had just hit $25 billion in the Christmas rush a month before (up from $3 billion and $5 billion respectively in 1982). The biggest states – New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland – were also the biggest consumers, signalling the obvious that it’s mostly people doing the shopping, not just companies or governments. 
     
They liked it even more in Canada, with monthly retail figures in February 2009 hitting $33 billion, likewise concentrated in the big population centres of Ontario and Quebec. Retail numbers in the United Kingdom hit £101 billion that month (having just peaked for Christmas at £136 billion) and in the United States for January 2010, all retail and food services ca-chinged up $322 billion. Imagine the picture if we included shopping mega-paradises such as France and Italy, South Korea, Japan, the so-called BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the African giants Nigeria and Ghana, the whole of South-East Asia and that other mass of humanity, the Middle East: all those shoe shops, markets, souqs, strip malls, villages, cellar doors and cheese shops!
     
Really, we’re talking the whole world. Society collectively loves the range of businesses typically surveyed in these figure sets: motor vehicle traders and parts suppliers; furniture and home furnishings; electronics and household appliances (including radio, televisions and computers and software); building materials and garden equipment; paint and wallpaper; hardware; food and beverage stores such as grocery stores and supermarkets; beer, wine, and liquor stores; health and personal care stores; pharmacies and drug stores; gasoline (petrol) stations; clothing and clothing accessories stores (men’s, women’s, family, ‘other’); shoes; jewellery; sporting goods; hobby, toys, games, book, and music stores; general merchandise stores; department stores; discount department stores; warehouse clubs and superstores; all other general merchandise stores; miscellaneous store retailers; office suppliers; stationery, and gift stores; novelty and souvenir stores; used merchandise stores; non-store retailers such as electronic shopping and mail-order houses; fuel dealers; food services and drinking places; full service restaurants; limited service eating places; and drinking places. Harder to count but more pervasive and more fun to visit are tourism outlets and the fresh produce, fish, fruit and vegetable and farmers’ markets around the world which operate sometimes on the ‘black’ side of the market (no paperwork, no tax, no questions asked) and which just as often barter, trade and work on handshakes. Then there are the so-called ‘flea markets’, known in some parts as car-boot sales, suitcase rummages and second-hand markets, where non-registered traders hawk craft goods for cash, alongside surplus home equipment or deceased estate goods. 
     
​Off to one side of this phantasmagoria but nevertheless essentially shopping are three behemoths: the real estate market, where buying and selling houses takes place in streets, apartment blocks, rural and semi-rural districts – even private islands – and online day and night around the world; the world’s financial markets, increasingly colonised by ‘citizen traders’, individuals whose participation, just like citizen journalists, has become enabled by digital technologies such as the Internet and mobile telephony; and there’s the growing list of online shopping, publishing and trading sites such as Amazon, iTunes, Lulu, Craig’s List, EBay, and the games site Steam, launched by digital development company, Valve, where more than 1100 games are stocked, which claims an active user base of 25 million gamers, and logged-in shopper numbers ranged from 1.28 million to 2.24 million in July 201062. For each of these big sites there are hundreds smaller ones online, selling shoes, clothes, books, travel and food.


Buy the full book now:

​See you next week ...
2 Comments

The search for delight and customer satisfaction

7/4/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
Today we start the new weekly blog Shop Your Way to Success in which I will reveal some of the secrets of retail and publishing success I discovered in my book Shopping News. 

Over the weeks ahead, I'll look at and explain 16 original and practical models for how businesses can attract and please more customers without compromising ethics or quality. It’s for everyone in business (but if you know anyone in media and publishing especially, share it with them ... they'll thank you for it).

You'll have the chance to join our FaceBook group Shop Your Way to Success and talk about sales and marketing strategies with other small and micro-business owners. Get hot tips from others in your shoes!

We'll have monthly giveaways and other "free stuff" for your business and news from retail, manufacturing and marketing.

Our featured video this week comes from 1977, so it's appropriate for 2017 ... a mature 40-year-old drop from Lindeman's wines.

We're featuring it because Lindeman's have stuck with their decades-old campaign of trying to surprise and delight their customers ... and they continue this approach today.

When you play the video, look through the comments and learn that acclaimed Australian author Peter Carey wrote ads for Lindeman's ... did he write this one? Let us know if you know ...

0 Comments
    Picture

    Authors

    Australian-born photojournalists John Cokley and Pip Hanrick toured Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Singapore and some of their collected notes, advice, new stories and original images appear here, our food and wine feature Far Flung Food and in other travel publications (see links as they're published). Contact John and Pip by email through their publisher, Small Batch Books.

    Archives

    July 2020
    June 2020
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2017
    April 2017

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly