According to our IT guys, over the last 3 months 24% of you that visited our website used the Mozilla Firefox web browser. The other main browsers used were Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. Personally I use the Firefox browser and am very happy with it (well, to be honest as happy with [...]

Here’s a question to get the marketing part of your brain thinking. How do you double sales of a product without changing the marketing mix (i.e. without changing the Product, Price, Promotion or Place)? Well, if the product you are trying to sell is baby food then the answer seems to be courtesy of Lady [...]

Sometimes it’s the simple ideas in business that work. 21 years ago in April 1990, the retailer Poundland was set up. On the face of it their approach was pretty simple – all the items in their shops would retail at £1 (hence the name “Poundland”). They now have over 250 stores and sell 3,000 [...]

The supercar manufacturer Aston Martin is associated with top end cars such as the Aston Martin DBS (shown left) which retails at £179,000. James Bond is also regularly seen saving the world in one of their cars. So it’s come as a bit of a surprise to some people that in May of this year [...]

Christmas shopping for me is normally a last minute rush before the shops close on 24 December. This year though I was determined to be organised and last weekend headed off to hit the shops in London’s West End. It was a pleasant surprise to find that arguably the two most famous shopping streets in [...]

Marks & Spencer (M&S) are one of the best known retailers in the UK. First established back in 1884 they have been a mainstay of British fashion for as long as anyone can remember. They have however had a turbulent journey over the last few years but yesterday they announced their results for the quarter [...]

At this year’s San Francisco World Spirits Competition the best Vodka in the world award was won by a small distillery based in rural England in Herefordshire. Chase Vodka beat off 115 other entries to win. This is a superb achievement by them. I’ve been lucky enough to try some of the vodka. It’s certainly [...]

Nestlé’s Kit Kat is one of the world’s best selling chocolate bars. It is estimated that over 400 Kit Kat fingers are consumed every second worldwide and every 5 minutes enough Kit Kat fingers are produced to out stack the Eiffel Tower. Whilst most people associate Kit Kat with its red wrapper alongside the classic [...]

Earlier this week Bloomsbury released their latest set of financial results. Bloomsbury are a publisher and their list of titles includes the ubiquitous Harry Potter books. Their 2009 results showed a fall in pre-tax profits of 35% with earnings falling from £11.6 million to £7.7 million. As keen muggles know (if you don’t know what [...]

The science fiction film Avatar which was written and directed by James Cameron has been in the press a lot recently and has had some good write ups by some of the critics. It is an incredibly successful film and today it was announced that it has overtaken Titanic to become the highest grossing movie [...]