Back to the future
March 4th, 2009
Ray Hammond has been kind enough to send me a link to a blog post he has written on the recession.
Archive
Author Archive
Futurology
March 2nd, 2009
This week I was fortunate enough to see the futurologist Ray Hammond speak. He used to live next door to Steve Jobs dontchaknow. He managed to cover pretty much the whole of life within 45 minutes from the past to the future, the local to the global and the real to the virtual.
He touched on the recession, which is why I’m mentioning him here, and he said a few interesting things:
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Parking mad
February 23rd, 2009
I was in a shop yesterday and heard an advert on the radio for a local shopping centre that left me standing open-mouthed and dumbstruck. It offered parking at half price on Sundays plus a free environmentally-friendly hessian shopping bag.
My mind started racing thinking of the stupidity of an ad agency who came up with a giveaway that had a moral message directly opposed to the thing they were connecting it with. And to do
it in such a blatant and idiotic way. And it’s not as if it’s impossible to reconcile the problem of how to put a green sheen on a businesses’ intrinsic un-greeness. Airport websites deal with offsetting greenhouse gas emissions. They don’t shy away from it, or disconnect it from their business, but they don’t deliberately ask people to draw a line between the two things either.
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The Manual
February 13th, 2009
“Make sure very few tills are manned. Punters will have to queue for longer, but so what? The longer they’re there, the more time they have to pick up the high-margin items near the check-outs.”
Someone passed me a link to this article the other day. The Manual smacks of a fake, but I’m sure a more subtle version of it does exist somewhere. The underlying theme is, of course, making money and who doesn’t want that? Even in service industries you can get the same effect: cut the phone lines to your local branches and introduce a call centre, disenfranchise your staff, keep the face-to-face interaction as far removed from the actual business processes as possible, don’t allow even management to be able to make the smallest decisions, etc. All will minimise responsibility and maximise profits.
Sampling
February 7th, 2009
Everyone loves something free. And free stuff involving food or drink is really great. That’s why it’s a shame that the great art of sampling – promoting your product by giving bits away free – is such a shame. When it happens in my local supermarket it just seems to be a bored member of staff with a table of tiny cardboard cups and a pile of coupons.
A skate agent
February 6th, 2009
Missed an opportunity for the perfect credit crunch winter photo yesterday: A man sledging down a hill on a house “For Sale” sign.
Dead British Brands
January 27th, 2009
No. 1 in an occasional series – MFI
Where we try and stay away from the nostalgia that swamps an occasion like the closing of Woolworths and think of a few words to say about the brand and how it conducted itself in life, as well as in death, and if there are any lessons we can take from that.
How to market your business in a recession
January 20th, 2009
We are two web marketing professionals who decided to set up a blog about the current recession and how businesses can survive (and thrive) through it. Some of it won’t be big, but it’ll all be clever.
Must Read Posts
- 10 iphone apps money can’t buy
- Eshop recession marketing tips
- Page 1 of google hero
- You are your network, the magic of 10 percent
- Free as you want to be
- Making appy
- Ride on time
- Walk on by
- Get on with it
- Killer Landing Pages - Real World Lessons (part 1)
Your god-like hosts
Paolo - glorious leader of South Wales web empire Refresh Creative. Paolo also reviews cheap laptops for his other website.
Andy - runs a web consultancy based in the sunny city of Bath. He has been working in the online industry for 13 years. His mission is to get his clients to "improve their business, achieve the results they want and not get suckered into spending money on things they don't need!".
