I knew I was cutting it fine to catch the 19.20 from Waterloo the other night. But I’ve done it often, and know which platform to head for. The train was still showing on the board. So I was more surprised than anything else when the doors closed in front of me, and I watched from platform 3 as the train pulled out. “But it’s leaving early!” I protested to the unruffled train controller who was right beside me as he waved the train off. Read More

The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed, goes the saying. Logically, the most developed markets are ahead, so what they have now is what we’ll get soon. In Europe, we used to look at the USA and Japan for trends and innovation ideas which we could adopt or adapt to our own marketplace. In food and beverage, this held true for a long time, in part because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Corporations large and small imported or copied successful products and brands from markets they saw as being more advanced. Read More

Whatever happened to disintermediation? Terrible word, big idea. The thought was that the internet would enable buyers and sellers to connect directly, cutting out middle men who were just a cost in the system. Ebay is probably the largest and most successful business built on connecting buyers and sellers directly. Uber and Hailo do the same for car travel, in different ways – Hailo leveraging the existing taxi network, Uber seeking to bypass it. Most of these started as amateur alternatives to the established trading systems, Read More

Last night I found myself asking, “What is this N’duja sausage?” Both Pizza Express and Zizzi’s have adopted it big time lately. The staff member in Zizzi’s couldn’t tell me how to say it, never mind what it is, so I ordered my pizza without it. Today I got an email from Zizzi’s giving me the answer to both. Genius joined-up marketing comms? Actually, the opposite. The person in the restaurant had no real answer for a question which she was probably not hearing for the first time. Read More

If only. But you need some basis for deciding who you’ll spend your valuable time with. That depends of course on why you’re doing it. Let’s assume for now that we’d all like to be able to spot which businesses are likely to survive and grow. The benefits to the investor are obvious, but no one who values their time wants to spend it with a loser. That’s a harsh word, given many entrepreneurs learn from failed ventures and go on to success. Read More

Four tips for marketers to get the most out of the tech start-up scene

The appetite among marketers to get close to the tech city scene is such that one enterprising chap is selling Shoreditch tours. I’m not sure how you measure the ROI of looking at Google Campus from the outside, but it tells me the days of shrinking marketing budgets are over.

Many marketers from big brands are dead keen to engage with tech start-ups. Read More

Time is money but few organisations treat it that way. A junior person who can’t sign off a $1000 invoice can schedule a regular meeting which costs twenty times that in management salaries, with no approval process at all. So says a well-researched piece in this month’s issue of Harvard Business Review (Reprint R1405D). A team from Bain used information from the online calendars of executives across more than a dozen large corporations to show how casually time is treated. Read More

What do Chelsea tractors and email overload tell us about forecasting?

Picture yourself in a trends workshop, innovation brainstorm or scenario planning day, one day in the not-too-distant past. Your task is to help an automotive company see what sort of vehicles people in Europe will want in the future. Here’s what you’re being told. Fuel prices are rising. There’s a lot of talk about “peak oil” (whatever happened to that?). There are more and more cars on the roads, Read More

A friend, let’s call him Alan, confessed to me that, through a combination of devotion to Nick Cave and a senior moment, he had pre-ordered a new Nick Cave album on Amazon twice, three months apart. Realising his mistake when two CDs arrived separately, he contacted Amazon to arrange for a return and a refund. Their response: we understand how these things happen. Don’t bother to return it, we’ll credit your account anyway.

Now imagine some other possible responses. Read More

Marketers should not focus on return on investment (ROI) as their key metric. Why not? Because it is not ambitious enough.

ROI is a helpful way to compare media choices, or different creative options, or even different service models. It is an important tool for marketers to make choices, and to improve. But be careful: it’s also a trap.

Sometimes ROI looks like clear proof of money well spent, to justify budgets to others. Read More