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- 05/04/09 - The World’s All A Twitter
The World is All a Twitter
The Guardian newspaper in England keeps writing about the importance of Twitter so it was not much of a surprise that for its April Fool it was that the print edition would terminate and the whole paper would be produced on Twitter. Well as it happened I just decided to follow my own local paper the Somerset Western Gazette, and last Thursday and Friday I was totally overwhelmed by Tweets from it. Apart from births, marriages and deaths I imagine they did Tweet the entire paper to their eleven followers. It would be interesting to learn from them the rational and approach they have towards this use of the digital space.
With pop stars and celebrities hiring staff to Twitter for them the value of this micro-blogging is certainly diminished (apart from Claudia Winkleman with 11267 followers and Stephen Fry with 377926) but three uses I have seen lately highlight its value and its potential. First was the way the University of Bath used it to tell staff or students whether buses were running during the heavy snow, the second was when a family member travelled around Africa and used a private loop to advise family and friends about where they were, and finally the ease with which we could monitor comments and events at the recent G20 meeting in London. The fact that both Sky and the Daily Telegraph were streaming these Tweets on a huge newsroom wall panel was indicative of how important Twitter is in modern news gathering.
When I ask my students (I teach a small number of marketing classes at Bath University and Yeovil College) I get negative comments about the interest in and use of these areas in their life and in marketing. Yet everyone has a mobile phone and a computer in their lives even if they do not spend all their time at home on Second Life and Facebook. What we have to recognise is that every consumer is configured in a different way. Some are relentless in texting and sending photos, some prefer to spend huge amounts of time on social networking sites such as Bebo and Facebook, and some are hooked on Twitter. The fact that Rupert Murdoch bought My Space, ITV bought Friends Reunited, and Google bought YouTube with a current rumour that they are interested in Twitter just goes to prove that all these tools are interlinked and to capture value from them as a business venture and as a marketer you have to work to understand how these linkages work with your customer segments. Since some marketers are not keen to experiment this becomes a problem as I still think the best way to get to grips with all these new ideas is to give them a try.
First Move to Ralph Lauren
There is no doubt that the iPhone and the iTouch has made a change in all this since the middle of 2008 with all its new applications. I am up to five pages in my iTouch with apps that go from news to stocks, through sports and scrabble dictionaries. I have today pulled off a lot of music to make more room for applications and podcasts. One I think is a harbinger for the leather world is Ralph Lauren with its simple easy to use feature on its seasonal range and the history of its iconic Ricky bag.
twitter.com/michaelredwood
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- 29/03/09 - Linked in and the No 1 Ladies Detective Agent
Linking up
You can tell it's a recession. There is a run on suits and more formal wear for both those looking for work and those trying to stay in work. This is no time to look frivolous or too casual. And LinkedIn is growing at a fantastic speed. I joined in a couple of years ago more out of curiosity than anything and many of the friends I invited came on board reluctantly.
Most of these colleagues had crude and simple profiles and contacts in single figures. In the last three months all this has changed and every day there comes a note of colleagues who have updated their profiles and added another half dozen links. Suddenly you find that you are chatting in groups with friends and colleagues that are impossible to get together otherwise.
Many of these senior business people have been reluctant converts to the Internet and email, and some use secretaries and PAs to cover them for them. Will they be using these "ghostwriters" for Linkedin, facebook and Twitter?
For job searching I have my doubts about Linkedin but for learning about issues in your work area and identifying key players this is a great tool. And of course you don't need to dress formally to take part.
BMC: No 1 Ladies Detective Agency Required
One organization I cannot find on Linkedin is the Botswana Meat Commission the large meat packing organization that used to be the number 2 business after Diamonds in Botswana. Apparently their tannery is closed and unsalable because of an environmental report that says the plant needs to be relocated. I am keen to see a copy if possible, but cannot make contact.
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- 17/03/09 - The Essence of Strategy
In the UK the word "sorry" has been very much in the news lately. After over ten years in power and a mountain of claims about the strength of the UK economy to withstand any global recession people think they should accept some responsibility for the current mess the UK economy is in. More important in reality is to be able to lay out the background to what is going on and to be able to develop policies from an understanding of the bigger picture.
In management terms this is called putting things in context. Understanding the context is often an excuse for senior academics not to help you in my experience and they just say "it all depends on context". But in trying to get a feel for the strategic issues and ability to step back and see the big picture is vital for a business just as much as it is for a government.
Some of my own thoughts on the recession and its implication for industry are in the talk I gave in India in February which you can read by clicking on the link on the front page of the web site. There are three aspects to doing this sort of analysis and as in most of marketing none can be categorized as particularly difficult.
- Read and study widely so that you are up to date with what is going on in the world, in different parts of the economy, in technology and in as many areas as you have time and interest. For me this is about picking up all sorts of newspapers and magazines while travelling around the world and having regular subscriptions to certain newspapers and magazines. The Internet helps a lot as does just being inquisitive.
- Continuously do macro environmental analysis of situations and businesses. When I started in industry this was normally a chat over coffee, or more likely a beer or two. Then we learnt about this thing called a PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social and Technical) to which later was added Environmental and Legal. So now some people call it a STEEPLE or PESTEL. To me is the first hour or so of conversation you have when you meet Don Roberto Palomo, the founder of ADOC in EL Salvador. He was my boss in the 1970s and one of the best you can find. I only meet him rarely now if he comes to the trade show in Bologna or we go back to Salvador on holiday but I treasure those moments and can find no better way to describe the foundations of the macro-environmental analysis than listening to Don Roberto discuss what is going on and how it effects his business locally and internationally.
- Consider networks. The term "network" is very much abused these days and had to be counted as a weasel word as a consequence. From nipping off to breakfast meetings or cocktail hours to "network" in search of clients or a new job to the impact of relationships in localized industrial clusters the term network gets thrown in at every turn. Yet if you look at www.impgroup.org you will recognize that for the last 35 years a senior group of academics have been working on the way that businesses interact in a network environment. The essence of this is that "no man is an island" and that every business is part of a network, indeed viewed certain ways it can be a number of networks, and that its control of its destiny is limited by what else is going on the network. A company can do many things to improve its network position but it has to recognize that others in the network will observe and react, and that events like recessions and major currency changes will impact the network and its various actors in different ways. Observing and analyzing these networks is part of business strategy but generally companies tend to look at the network areas that are quite close in. The networks do actually spread out globally but it is natural that a company with limited time and resources only examines the area it considers most relevant. This we call the network horizon. In times of global financial problems such as now senior executives need to widen their network horizons and look much wider than normal for the activities that might impact on their business.
So this is your starting point after which you do all the other marketing things such as estimating your strengths and weaknesses and those of your competitors and building your new or adjusted strategy.
For our government we have three things which have happened. A housing crisis, a banking crisis, and a stock market crisis. Frankly speaking I think we all saw that in some countries, especially the UK but also places like the US, New Zealand and earlier in the decade the Netherlands where house prices were overheated. All through the decade the Economist has been publishing the average cost of a house against the average wage for various countries and highlighting where some correction was needed. I seem to have been lecturing about it in my course at Bath University for years. How in ten years the UK moved from a save to spend to a borrow to buy society more like the US. Students end University owing £15000 to £20000 then need to buy a car and they have no chance of saving a deposit for a house or of getting a mortgage to buy one on any acceptable multiple. This is important for marketers as it shows how in the last fifteen years society has changed. The young marry later, have children later and buy houses later. Since they have to have a life they spend money differently from their parents. Holidays, automobiles, eating out, clothing and footwear are all consumed in different ways. Important for all marketers to know, not just those involved in consumer marketing.
So we let our housings get over-valued yet encouraged our banks to lend cheap money to people to keep on buying and to lend at 100% and more so they would money extra to go out and keep the retail economy ticking over. Don't tell me this was not seen as a risk - it was a constant discussion over dinner for the last five years. So if the housing bubble bursts then the banks will suffer from people not being able to pay off loans and mortgages and the stock market will suffer as employment or the fear of it leads to a reduction in consumer spending. And no one saw it coming? Tell me another. It is not financial knowledge that was missing, it was basic macro-environmental analysis that any marketer can do in their sleep.
I heard the government was putting out a PR contract for £300000 to help with the London G20 meeting in April. If they had spent a few hundred on any decent marketer three or five years ago to look at the bigger picture we would all be better off.
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- 09/03/09 - The New Overseas is at Home
Some of my readers of this blog and at the University of Northampton http://www2.northampton.ac.uk/appliedsciences/appliedscience/bslt/mike-redwood-blog will now that I am grounded for a while after a car accident. So I am using some of the time that I am lying flat on my back to do two things. One is to try and move forward my research into the Booth Group although I can only do so much before I need to visit Liverpool where we have discovered what we think are more partners letters from the 19th century and early 20th.
Equally I am trying to understand better the role of social media and the likes of Twitter in marketing and testing them through my use via iTouch Applications which are fantastic. I do not know how this will work out but WiFi tools like the iTouch are showing a different level of interraction of the individual and information is certainly unfolding.
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- 15/02/09 - Dangerous Words
I have always argued an industry has to defend its product and its brand, and the brand leather is certainly under attack from many sides. Look at the article in today's (15h February 2009) Observer Magazine:.http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/15/lucy-siegle-dilemma-eco-friendly-green-living/print
This article "Is there a viable eco alternative to leather?" is supposed to be an "environmental" artilce. Ithas some fair points about the chemcials used in tanneries and the industry's carelessnes with them, along with the transfer of tanning to parts of the world where the environmental aspects are note viewed, or enforced, as seriously as they should be. Yet it is hugely superficial as sweeping in its comments and full of errors. 90% of leather comes from bovine and the number of hides is growing faster than meat. These errors are used to attack the tanners' rather weak argument that leather making is only the management of bi-products. The author also worries about landfill issues with some flippant comments about wearing footwear longer.
These are big and serious issues and deserve proper discussion based on facts. No industry can afford to be damaged by weasel words, but industries like leather make themselves vulnerable by not bothering to turn up. It is not that they do not sit at the table, it is worse than that. It is that they do not think they need to sit at the table. Just look at the latest comment from the APLF where Ron Sauer will run a discussion on the hide price crash with one question already identified - "absence of leather association involvement during the present problematic period."
Considering how hard so many tanners have worked, so many national tanning industried have worked to correct historic errors and make leather a clean renewable business it is truly a great sadness that the industry bodies are not strong enought or interested enough to defend the brand "leather". They should not only be responding to these articles which damage their industry, they should be setting the agenda. Leather is a good material, properly made, and one that consumers love. We need to be sure that nothing gets in the way of that consumer feel for leather in these difficult times
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