Daniel Todaro
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Articles by Daniel Todaro
AI may be the future, but customer experience must meet the price-point
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AI may be the future, but customer experience must meet the price-point
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AI and autonomous hardware takes centre stage at IFA 2026
AI and robotics dominated the show floor at IFA 2026, with manufacturers showing off everything from smarter home appliances to robotic companions. Daniel Todaro, CEO of Gekko, reports from Berlin on the products that stood out, the brands making their mark and what retailers can take away from this year’s show. From the moment you arrive at IFA 2026, a tangible shift is immediately palpable. Someone has been listening, and the changes are resoundingly positive.
What the World Cup Reveals About Effective Sales Promotions
By Daniel Todaro, CEO at Gekko Group Global sporting events have long represented some of the biggest opportunities in the marketing calendar and the recent World Cup has been no exception, generating huge audiences, heightened consumer spending and an influx of brand activity. But beyond the headlines, the biggest successes highlight how more brands are adding real value without the hefty spend associated with sponsorship deals and advertising.
From stage to shop Floor: Why product launch success relies on workforce readiness
Consumers have never had more choice when it comes to outlets to buy their next big ticket item. For retailers, this has raised the bar, and ahead of a big product launch, understanding the customer journey is critical to achieving sales. For many, the belief that the journey starts as the customer enters the store is outdated.
Thought Leader: Curating the consumer electronics customer journey through training
By Daniel Todaro, CEO, Gekko Group When independent stores raise the issue of needing more support from brands to compete against multiple and online retail, there’s no support more valuable than training. Without the sales skills to confidently identify the customer’s needs to sell the benefits of a product that is right for them, you can’t really blame the brand if you aren’t selling more products than forecasted.
How to add festive sparkle to the in-store experience
Experience, promotions, in-store moments and well-trained staff are essential in helping shoppers find the perfect gift. CEO UK&I Gekko Group Marketing As the nation starts getting out the decorations and ‘All I Want for Christmas’ takes over the airwaves, one thing is certain, the festive shopping season is well and truly underway. But for retailers, this isn’t just the season to be jolly, it’s a time of great angst.
Why Forcing Loyalty Could Be a Terrible Long-Term Strategy
Nearly everyone in the UK is signed up to at least one loyalty scheme, according to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). But the shift from a points-based reward system to a membership that offers reduced pricing at the point of purchase strong-arms consumers into signing up, irrespective of want or need. Following high inflation over the past two years that has seen prices rocket, many consumers are trying to cut their costs.
Good CX cannot exist without good staffing
The recent Centre for Retail Research figures showed that around 120,000 retail jobs were lost last year. While some job losses could not be avoided as behemoths of the UK’s high street collapsed, other retailers are reducing staff numbers to cut overhead costs and align with reduced footfall. But what does this mean for customer experience? And how could that impact retailers’ ambitions?
The collaboration advantage: A new frontier for competitive businesses
Business ManagementColumnistsEntrepreneurshipGrowth Daniel Todaro, consumer behaviour expert and Group MD of Gekko, explains how collaboration fuels business growth and how it could be the X factor for your business. When the going gets tough, the tough get going and businesses are having to dig deep right now. Whether it’s big businesses like FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) or start-ups – we’re seeing the business economic model in full swing.
Empowering small businesses: A plea for supportive Government policies
Business ManagementColumnistsEconomy & PoliticsEntrepreneurship Daniel Todaro, consumer behaviour expert and Group MD of Gekko, asks if the UK Government is failing small businesses in economic recovery and offers some suggestions for encouraging long-term growth.
THE POWER OF ONLINE: ‘You can sell more if you’re running an effective e-commerce site’
Creating an effective online presence is hard and maintaining it is harder still, so why do it? Well, it’s the virtual window to your store and even if it’s a non-transactional site, it’s just as important as your store experience. It is estimated that 21 per cent of UK retail purchases are expected to take place online in 2023. So when considering your own website, always ask yourself what you want the site to achieve.
Building Brand Loyalty in the Modern Age - A New Route to Success
The concept of building brand loyalty used to be relatively straightforward. Effective marketing and delivery of a positive customer experience would create a positive association for a brand. The lifetime value of that relationship could then be hugely profitable, with consumers unlikely to switch. However, we now live in a world of choice and information overload. An increasingly digital landscape, dominated by tech giants who hold many of the cards.
How Brands Create an Emotional Connection with Their Customers
The role of the brand in peoples’ lives has changed dramatically over the past few years. Consumers have spent two years decluttering, throwing away, updating, and changing what they need. As they’ve assessed the results, people’s attitudes towards certain brands have also changed. Brands that invented themselves decades ago are not necessarily communicating successfully or coming across in the same way anymore because people have changed and moved on.
Truth Matters: How to Appeal to Savvy Gen Z Shoppers
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, an independent study estimated that Gen Z’s direct and indirect spending power reached up to $143 billion. This generation is now at a level making brands and retailers alike stand up and take note. It is also a generation motivated by different factors, unforgiving of poor service, and experience hungry. Brands need to evolve to remain relevant for this new powerful audience of consumers, yet crucially not alienate existing audiences.
What Brands Can Learn from the Chinese Approach to Innovation
Since some rather hard-hitting sanctions were applied to the leading Chinese tech brand Huawei in the Europe and USA, you might think Chinese brands would be in retreat. Far from it. In many ways, the motivation to dominate in specific categories has seen their brands lead the way in innovation and brand development with a targeted, customer-centric approach. Huawei has quickly pivoted to develop its own operating system and focus more on a huge domestic market.
Brands Don’t Lose That Human Touch - Time to Get Creative
Brand ‘touchpoints’ are increasingly becoming digital, rather than physical, in a world of social distancing. With physical retail in a cycle of lockdowns and people subject to ongoing restrictions, the world of browsing and the art of touch are becoming lost – a necessity of social distancing and hygiene measures. But this key ‘human’ sense influencing purchase simply can’t be replicated in the information-led, online realm.
Luxury Retailing in Times of Crisis - Regaining the Crown
I read with interest about how Luxury Fashion Boutiques opened in Paris, one of the first capitals to do so. This created much excitement amongst those fashion-starved aficionados and trend-setters. I’ve said it before: Retail is possibly one of the most dynamic industries globally and luxury brands lead in this area of expertise in many ways, like no other.
Live the Experience and Feel the Brand
Henry Matisse once said “creativity takes courage” and we’ve certainly seen a lot of creative bravery from brands that now have an incredible marketing canvas on which to paint. It’s a great time to be a marketer, leveraging opportunity and enabling people to immerse and engage in what a brand has to offer. And this has seen some incredible business transformations, with brands rising out of the ashes to new-found fame whilst others find themselves, sadly, unable to capitalize.
Will Luxury Brands Become Irrelevant?
With a market of over £200B globally, the luxury fashion brand sector is significant; you only have to look at conglomerates such as Richemont, LVMH Group, and Kerring which within their stables boast, Alexander McQueen, Balenciaga, Chloe, Cartier, Dior, Fendi, Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Stella McCartney to name a few. Whilst in China, the market share is set to increase with 14% by 2025, it is set to contract by 8% in Europe and the US.
Instagram Stories reaches 500 million users per day as Facebook ad revenue rises
Facebook’s Q4 earnings call revealed that Instagram Stories has now reached a daily user count of 500 million. That figure stood at 100 million in October 2016 and 400 million as recently as June. This means that approximately half of the 1 billion Instagram users are now checking out Instagram Stories daily. They also reported that 2 million advertisers are now buying Stories ads on Instagram and Facebook, prompting CEO Mark Zuckerberg to call the offering a game-changer.
Facebook shuts down controversial market research program that pays teens for data on iOS
As the battle for social media dominance wages on, Facebook was recently discovered trying to gain the upper hand by paying teens for access to their private data. The platform has been secretly paying young people to install a virtual private network known as “Facebook Research” that allows the firm to keep track of their phone and internet activity.
2018 peak season is the last chance for many UK retailers to avoid inevitable collapse
The recent demise of many well-known high street brands means that retailers are under increasing pressure to ensure a profitable peak season. With Christmas on the horizon, this will be a big test for retailers, many of whom generate up to 30% of their annual sales during the holiday season.
5 Quick Tips for Posting Video Ads on Facebook
If you haven’t included Facebook ads to your marketing campaign yet, 2019 is the right time to do it. The advertiser’s dashboard has significantly evolved over the past several years, and there is enough data on what works and what doesn’t – backed by the early adopters’ experience. The best part, however, paid social is still more affordable than paid search. And with its mind-blowing targeting capabilities, for many niches including B2B, Facebook will certainly be a more efficient platform.
How to navigate the ‘maze’ to purchase
In the eyes of the seller, shopping is a travelogue. Retailers often talk about a purchase funnel or a path to purchase – and how it forms part of the consumer journey. That might suggest that it’s a linear process, like most journeys that go from A to B, and for a long time a lot of brands thought that way. They assumed that a shopper picked up initial inspiration (perhaps from an ad), maybe did some research, compared prices and then made a purchase.
The State of Social Media in 2018
People are spending more time than ever before on social media – a new survey of social media users found that 86 percent of Americans use social media at least once per day, and 72 percent use it multiple times per day. The Manifest’s survey of 627 social media users finds that many people use several social media channels more often in 2018 than they did in 2017. This includes 63 percent who said they spend more time on YouTube and 61 percent who reported heavier use of Instagram.
Using Tech for Good
The phrase ‘digital wellbeing’ is being thrown around more than ever. Even the world’s tech giants are beginning to address the obsessive behaviour around usage. And following the news about Apple’s new ‘digital wellbeing’ tools aiming to help reduce screen time, and Google unveiling a range of tools focused on “digital wellbeing”, designed to help people disconnect from their phones, it’s clear things are changing. However, there’s no need for brands to panic.
Something old, something new: the challenges of advertising in a multi-format world
We live in a time of change. Barely a day goes by without new developments in the world of technology, whether it’s new consumer tech – such as the boom in connected home devices with Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home – or broader movements disrupting the sector, from alternative reality to artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These technologies have the potential to change our lives on an individual level – but they’re also transformative in what they can offer the advertising industry.
Keep it simple, stupid. Retailers and brands need to demystify gadgets for consumers
I’ve worked in the retail tech industry for over twenty years and to rip off the famous campaign ‘There’s a Beer For That’ there’s now definitely ‘A Gadget For That’ and it got me thinking. There’s so much ‘stuff’ around and I wondered if consumers truly understand the full functionality of the products they buy.
KEEP CUSTOMERS IN-STORE FOR LONGER
Retailers need to give people a reason to come into their stores and an experience that will keep them there for longer, and learn from the stores that are doing it right, says Daniel Todaro, MD of field marketing agency Gekko In these challenging times, in-store theatre is possibly the retailer’s most powerful and effective way to attract more customers and convert more sales. Some may argue that Maplin was a great loss to the high street, and I agree, as it served a niche exceptionally well.
Has Product Placement Gone Too Far? | Brandingmag
Product placement within film and TV is hardly breaking news. Since the dawn of broadcast media, brands have been eager to muscle in on our attentions and put their logos in front of us. We now expect to see James Bond with his Omega watch, driving his Aston Martin and flashing his latest smartphone. But I have to ask, are brands now taking product placement to a whole new patronising level? Recently, we took the kids on a cinema trip to see The Smurfs 2 (not my choice, I hasten to add!).
Brand empathy in a general election
So here we go again, back to the polls. This time it seems like the UK is reluctantly being dragged to vote, less than one year since the EU Referendum which split the country down the middle, potentially further widening the divide in the nation. The cost of another election is expected to be high, with the recent EU referendum having cost the nation over £142m. However, the true cost is to the economy and brands as once again consumers hold back on spending and making those ‘considered’ purchase.
Focus on Streamlining the In-Store Experience for Customers to Return
Focus on Streamlining the In-Store Experience for Customers to Return Marks & Spencer (M&S) once again is in the news and is poised to close 60 poor-performing stores and increase its food presence due to falling fashion revenues and profit. Let’s not forget, this retailer has never placed itself as a high-fashion retailer, but one with a broad appeal for which it must cater.
How the Artificial and Virtual Are Transforming Consumer Electronics
The term “AI” (artificial intelligence) is being bounded about via all forms of media, but do many actually understand how AI is becoming part of the consumer electronics landscape in and amongst some of our most normal and everyday products, almost making smart technology old hat by comparison? The reality is that in order for AI to function, you need smart devices that enable you to join the dots (metaphorically) and make an AI solution work for you in your environment.
Brexit And The Technology Landscape
Brexit And The Technology Landscape On 23 June 2016, 17,410,742 people in the UK voted to leave the European Union, igniting the Brexit debate and speculation on what happens next. With this in mind, what are the potential implications for tech brands? With the immediate weakening of the Pound to US Dollar exchange rate, it has and will continue to have an impact on components that comprise end products, at the detriment of all consumers.
Should Brands Be ‘In’ or ‘Out’ of the Political Debate?
When considering how much time, money, and effort brands invest in establishing their equity as a valuable asset, you have to ask: should they be risking this equity by adopting a political position? The answer is probably not, just as you wouldn’t debate religion or social economics in the context of your brand.
Celebrity Endorsement in Technology Still Requires Innovation to Succeed
Is it a bird or a plane? No, it’s just Henry Cavill using his new Huawei P9+, making him the Ying to Scarlet Johansson’s Yang. Both celebrities have cleverly signed up to be the new ambassadors for China’s most recognised international mobile handset brand, Huawei.
A New Reality for Technology Brands
The art of branding technology was once the Holy Grail of marketing. How do you market something new, innovative, and conceptually unfamiliar to an apathetic audience unsure about a new product? Take for instance Apple launching the Macintosh during the 1984 Super Bowl when the world of technology seemed alien.
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