The start of the really warm weather has inevitably caused a flurry of consumer spending as we all rush to the suncare aisles, the garden centre or the hardware store… Suncare, gardening, DIY are all huge market sectors in their own right but when I (probably with hundreds of others) browsed these aisles at the weekend, I realised that — with a few exceptions — they are largely static ones. And all three have the potential to be so much more by reinventing and developing a new retail positioning and experiential — ‘X’ — factor.

Once upon a time a man called Lewis Carroll wrote a fantastical story about a girl called Alice… Now the launch of Disney/Tim Burton’s 3D film has catapulted the classic tale of Alice In Wonderland into the marketing stratosphere with brand owners jumping on the hype and linking everything from fashion to food to the Alice publicity machine…