As I write, QANTAS, the Australian Kangaroo, one of the few truly iconic Australian brands, is in the shitter.

Yesterday, their CEO Alan Joyce announced a massive loss for the quarter, 5,000 job cuts and the need to save (very quickly) a massive two billion dollars off the bottom line.

Now, I don’t profess to know anything about the running of a business of that size.

Although, I do wonder, how the hell does any business get in to such huge debt in the first place, and keep the doors open?!

Recently I’ve been trying to get in touch with the right person at one of those big social networks.

You know, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

I won’t say which one – it’s not important to the story.

And I want to stay friends with them all ;0)

Never burn a bridge I was once told.

I’m no designer – I leave the making stuff look pretty business to the experts.

In fact, there are days (most) when I don’t know whether to match my sox with my shoes or pants.

There’s too much riding on the design of things.

Sheep stations in some cases.

I mean, imagine buggering up the design of a M&Ms package.

Like, that could never happen, could it? Find out here …

Would you call your business card exciting? Unique marketing ideas stand out among the competition, and no marketing strategy is as traditionally mundane as the art of the business card. Remember that immortalized scene in “American Psycho”? Lead character Patrick Bateman compares his plain white business card against his colleagues’ equally boring business cards. They ironically compare texture, embossment and other puzzling qualities. Read on …

It absolutely shocks me that companies are still using paragraphs of unappealing text to explain what they do on their home pages. It seems that marketers still don’t know how long users stay on web pages and that they only have a few seconds to convince their potential customer to look around more. Otherwise their business goes elsewhere.

Yeah, yeah, I know this post isn’t marketing related.

Although it would be easy to argue it is.

If you’re not happy in yourself then it will reflect in the way you grow (or don’t grow) your business.

My great mate Ben sent this to me this morning with the note:

“Good morning champion … My amazing daughter Bella sent this to me this morning. Thought you might like the inspiration today.”

It made my day, and I hope it makes yours.

How do you tell your brand’s story in six seconds or less? Most TV and Web ads are 15-30 seconds, which can seem like an eternity in comparison, but companies across a multitude of verticals are marketing in a brand new way: Vine.

One of the greatest joys of business is pricing your products or services.

To think you actually get to set what the dollar value is for what you do and what it is worth. People can find this process hard because they don’t have a system in place to help them or that it’s done so rarely that they end up reinventing the wheel every time.

Here’s my technique to establish the final price of a product.

The value of providing world-class customer service in your business is now beyond doubt.

In years past companies would often stick their heads in the sand and hope that a dissatisfied customer would simply disappear…believing that their single voice wasn’t large enough to impact the business as a whole.

That approach never made sense. Read on …

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