Strategy Sessions

Luxury goods is an attractive sector. High end, non essential consumer products that are household names for most people, even though you may never own any of them.

Ashley McDonnell has spent the last 6 years working in Paris at the crossroads of digital and retail within the fashion and beauty industries. She began her career with a luxury e-retailer, and then joined LVMH Group as a digital analyst, working with luxury houses such as Louis Vuitton and Fendi to drive digital transformation.

If you don't know who LVMH are, you'll know their brands. The initials LVMH stands for "Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy" and holds brands like Moet, Krug, Dom Perignon, Kenzo, Marc Jacobs, Bulgari, TAG, Tiffany & Co... you get the picture. 

Ashley also led digital strategy for Dior's Travel Retail division within LVMH, focusing on capturing the opportunity of Global Chinese Travellers. She's now at Google, managing full-funnel digital projects for the world’s leading luxury brands - helping brands achieve excellence through technology.

We talk about sustainability, advertising, how marketing works in luxury and how you end up in Paris from Galway. 

We've got two T.O.P.T.I.P.S in this episode, with Emma Burdett and Danielle Phillips sharing their knowledge. Emma talks about reviews on Google My Business and Danielle talks about internal comms as staff come back from COVID furlough. 

I pick up the baton from Dan and keep talking COVID, but from a marketing perspective. My plea: focus. There's so much noise to DO MORE STUFF, but focus your marketing and magic will happen. 

Big thanks as always to our sponsor, Moyee Coffee. I'm a big fan of the coffee and the work they're doing to help farmers in Ethiopia and Kenya achieve a living income.  Please check them out. 

You can find Ash on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Some of the people and projects that were mentioned on the show were:

Georgi Dan making fashion from recycled inner tubes

Northern Irish designer JW Anderson

Loewe Spanish designer

Ash’s book recommendations are:

The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands by J N Kapferer and Vincent Bastien

Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built by Duncan Clark

T.O.P.T.I.P from Emma Burdett

Emma is Web & Digital Marketing Manager for Visit Belfast in, well, Belfast. She’s talking about Google My Business, more here.

Emma is on Twitter and LinkedIn and is always great fun to talk to.

T.O.P.T.I.P from Danielle Phillips

Danielle is the Founder at Inside Out Communications Consulting.

Danielle is on LinkedIn you should look her up.

Andi Jarvis

Make sure you subscribe to get the podcast every fortnight and if you enjoyed the show, please give it a 5* rating.

This episode was supposed to celebrate some of the great stuff in the US marketing world. Then George Floyd was murdered. I nearly binned the whole episode but thought it would be more useful to use the platform to say something about his murder, and also discuss what it's like being black in the UK.

Rand Fishkin is the cofounder and CEO of SparkToro, a new tool for audience intelligence and market research.

Rand talks about what it's like in the US during COVID, the launch of SparkToro and the marketing lessons he picked up along the way at Moz. He also talks about his future predictions for Google and what that might mean for the rest of us. He previously cofounded and led Moz, the SEO software company.

You can find Rand on Twitter and please do check out his new venture SparkToro, a seriously impressive tool.

Rand’s book recommendations are:

Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It by April Dunford

No Hard Feelings: Emotions at Work and How They Help Us Succeed by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy

Great By Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos and Luck - Why Some Thrive Despite Them All by Jim Collins

And Rand’s own book, which I’m recommending not him! Lost and Founder A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

Greg Gifford is the Vice President of Search at SearchLab and has over 17 years of online marketing and web design experience. He's an in-demand (and hilarious) conference speaker who lives for an obscure movie quote. Watch his T.O.P.T.I.P if you want to know how you can use Google My Business to help your local rankings.

Greg is on Twitter and LinkedIn and his Local Search Tuesdays is well worth checking out.

Andi Jarvis

Best place to get me is on Twitter or LinkedIn - I’d love to hear what you think of the show and if you’d like to discuss any of the issues raised today.

Want to see examples of the different approach the media takes with the Royals.

See Noel Clarke’s tweet about his movie and read my post about being black in Northern Ireland and my experience of being cropped out of a press photo.

Not sounding white on your CV / resume - press report covering all the studies.

“The Windrush scandal was not an accident” read more here.

The stats for Black and Ethnic Minorities being fined more for COVID related violations.

Make sure you subscribe to get the podcast every fortnight and if you enjoyed the show, please give it a 5* rating.

Andi Jarvis, Eximo Marketing.

Marketing lessons from a career in consumer marketing. Featuring Dan Rubel and Facebook ads advice from Gil David

Dan Rubel has worked at Procter and Gamble (which is where the rubbish P&G Tips episode name came from), Shop Direct (Very and Littlewoods) and is currently Customer Communications and Brand Director for Dixons Carphone, owner of Currys PC World and Carphone Warehouse. They’re the biggest electrical retailer in the UK (our equivalent of Best Buy) and Dan is responsible for all the brand communications.

In this episode he talks about what really matters to customers, how to make great advertising, the importance of recruiting the right people and the things he learned in his years at P&G - still the gold standard for a graduate marketing role. Andi follows Dan by talking to agency owners about what they need to do as they bounce back from the impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) and we round up with Gil David (Run DMG) sharing a T.O.P.T.I.P for making your Facebook ads deliver improved returns.

You can find Dan on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Dan mentions the following books and campaigns:

Jim Collins – Good to Great

Jim Collins – Built to Last

Campaigns Mentioned by Dan

Mylene Klass for Pantene

Currys PC World’s new lockdown ad

Walmart’s drive through campaign

Hun’s campaign for wine in a can and Hun’s Instagram is worth looking at

T.O.P.T.I.P from Gil David

GIl runs Run DMG, a Facebook Ads agency / consultancy based in Belfast and working with clients around the world.

Gil is on Twitter and LinkedIn or you can find him at the Run DMG

Andi Jarvis

Make sure you subscribe to get the podcast every fortnight and if you enjoyed the show, please give it a 5* rating.

Andi Jarvis, Eximo Marketing.

Andi Jarvis - Best place to get me is on Twitter or LinkedIn - I'd love to hear what you think of the show.

Jen Hoffman can be found on Twitter @_JHoff

You can find her writing on Medium and you should definitely check out the Scarlet Letter post and her thoughts on Leadership & Team Building

Want to dig into the books Jen recommends? Here they are:

Jen and I talked about someone who did a presentation at a conference talking about treating reports as marketing material. With a million apologies to Helen Pollitt, it was her! Her 10 minute presentation at Learn Inbound, Dublin, in August 2019 is worth a watch.

I've written more details about how to use ARM to select a social channel for your organisation which you can find on the Eximo Marketing blog.

And there are full details of the Strategy Sprint product that I talk about towards on the end of the show on this page on the site.

You can find Arpun on Twitter @ArpunBhuhi and the Distilled site is a goldmine of useful SEO information. Dive in.

Hope to see you back here in a fortnight.

Andi - Eximo Marketing

What's upcoming in Strategy Sessions, the new podcast from Eximo Marketing