The digital age has seen many pioneering businesses fall by the wayside due to their structural inability to adapt, reluctance to adapt or slowness to adapt. Kodak, Nokia and Blockbuster immediately spring to mind. But in today’s connected economy where trust is the most important...
This is one of the pivotal questions being posed at the SXSW festival which is on now in Austin, Texas. For the uninitiated, the South by Southwest Festival and Conference has evolved over the last 32 years from a humble music festival with 700 attendees,...
Like a line from a coming-of-age teen movie, the phrase ‘she just gets me’ comes to mind when talking about the impact a good algorithm can have on the relationship between a business and their customers. Don’t worry, this is not a post about the...
Like them or loathe them, cockroaches are well known for their longevity. The cockroach is estimated to be at least 200 million years old. And since there are cockroach fossils dating back as far as 350 million years, they actually pre-date some dinosaurs! So it was...
Recently walking past a coffee shop in Melbourne I saw this sign: Coffee $5 Coffee please $4 The first thing it reminded me of was my mother nagging me as a child of the importance of always saying please when you ask for something. The second, a much...
This week we celebrate one of America’s and P&G’s most iconic brands, Tide, reaching 10 years in the dry-cleaning business. What began as an innovative brand extension into a complex, competitive industry, has become a highly successful business as well as an impressive owned media...
I just came back from a lovely trip along the Digital Highway Stopped off at a few retailers along the way I called on dear old Amazon To see what they say They took me to their workshop And told their plans to me, so You better watch out You better...
John Lewis & Partners in the UK has declared 2018 to be the “year of shopping on the move”, citing in their Annual Report how smartphones now account for 42% of visits (up 17 percentage points year on year). Downloads of the John Lewis app...
We’ve talked in this parish before about the gap between promise and experience. Two years ago we called it the expectation gap. I believe that gap is widening and it seems the greater the promise in advertising, the worse the product experience. You may also...
This week, swimwear brand Seafolly launched interactive smart mirrors in their fitting rooms for the first time, following the footsteps of fashion retailers Mango, Ralph Lauren and Rebecca Minkoff who pioneered use of the technology in their stores. The intent is to offer greater convenience...