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Nicholas Watkis

Nicholas Watkis, AE MA DipM CMC FCIM
Nicholas Watkis set up Contract Marketing Service in 1981, providing professional interim marketing management for a wide variety of businesses. Over 30 years practical experience in organizations, large and small, national and international, led to the development of Business Performance Maximized specialist in marketing performance measurement.

The Post Virus Recession

The economic effect of the covid19 virus pandemic will be world-wide. The situation is unprecedented in every country where the economy has been locked...

Do your customers really matter?

Do your customers really matter or are they merely an inconvenient cash cow and means to an end? The prime responsibility of a commercial manager...

What goes around comes around

The Chartered Institute of Marketing has recently published the first part of a new survey, titled “The impact of marketing part 1 - the...

You may not be trading, but you are still in business

Commerce and business in general has been effectively shut down throughout the world as the result of the Coronavirus pandemic. Many businesses in retail,...

Stuff Happens

Donald Rumfolt said there are things we know we know. ... But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. ...

Top Down or Bottom Up?

How does your business and marketing department operate, - a top down command structure or a bottom up approach? A top down approach can...

Is your business successful? – It depends what you measure

Is your business successful? It depends how you define success. Is it the size of your market share, or the share price? Is it...

Customer service and Marketing should not be in separate silos

A recent short but interesting article in My Customer (14Oct19) entitled Why service and marketing should have a shared budget highlighted again how...

Who has the need and is it a problem?

The”Dragon’s Den” is a very successful television series. Every week, would be entrepreneurs bring their products seeking to entice the star “Dragons” to invest...

Are profits still a good thing?

A recent video on the Financial Times website was entitled, “Are Profits Still a Good Thing?” The video was concerned about investment, but it...

Is your knowledge based on fact or assumption?

It is a general observation that most of what people claim to know as fact, is based on hearsay, prejudice, “common knowledge”, the internet...

Are You Prepared For the Unexpected?

The whole purpose of business and marketing plans is to prepare for the expected and intended, but equally for the unexpected event or conditions...

Marketing or Commercial Management?

A recent article in the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s house magazine Catalyst is titled “Stand up for Marketing”. It is an interesting article, and...

What do we do now?

The corporate business plan defines for an organisation, the objectives to be achieved and the resources available. Achieving those objectives invites the question, “what...

Measurement might not be fun, but is essential for good management

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” said Peter Drucker. This statement applies as much to the income producing function as it...

New Year – New Thoughts

The beginning of every year is a time for reviewing the events of the past twelve months, while speculating on the year to come....

Are your staff a cost or an asset?

Financial executives have for a long time been fixated on the value of the “bottom line” and the value of the business to shareholders....

Closing the sale is the only way to make money

Whatever happened to the term salesman or sales person? It would appear that somehow, the term salesman or sales person has had to be...

Like it or not the Customer is still king

If you don’t treat customers with curtesy and respect, you soon won’t have them. The prime responsibility of a commercial manager is the production...

Commercial lessons from the Duke of Wellington.

Improbable as it may seem, a commercial manager can learn useful lessons from the famous Duke of Wellington. Two hundred years ago, Britain...

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