Retail revolution in India

150,000 chain stores in 15 years with massive growth and consolidation of mom and pop small retail outlets. Specialisation, department stores, new markets, growth of middle class, designer products, luxury goods and services, competitors to wal-mart and other supermarket chains. Emerging markets and new economies, Asia, China, India and Africa. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon

Why business has to make life better - values matter

Values really matter. People want to make a difference and feel proud of who they work for. Aditya Birla example of corporate responsibility and community involvement. Increasing motivation, winning war for talent, staff and customer retention and stronger brand and corporate image. Work of AIDS charity ACET as expression of corporate responsibility. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.

Strange death of modern advertising - feature by Maurice Saatchi in Financial Times

This week Maurice Saatchi made a fascinating confession:  “I feel as thought I am standing at the graveside of a well-loved friend called advertising”.   He describes the death of TV advertising as audiences diverted into an ever wider range of infotainment, and the fact that multi-tasking teenagers recall very little of the adverts they supposedly are exposed to on TV even if you can find them….  The result of multi-tasking with SMS, e-mail and everthing else at the same time as watching the football.

 

Saatchi reckons it all comes down to one word branding.  Owning a single idea like “search” = Google.   The trouble is that there are few words worth having and fierce competition for them.

 

And even if an agency has a great idea for a word, the industry itself is being re-shaped at tremendous speed by new media.

 

Most senior advertising executives have yet to get their heads around Google adsense for example, which is capable of creating customised ad content for a new page I create within 60 seconds of it being online.  Adsense goes further by pushing up or down different ads depending on how the users of that particular page on my website react.

 

Poor ads are removed – however much people pay for showing their content on the page – while lower paying but useful ads replace them.

 

The advertising space is thus being democratised, with huge implications for every brand-creator.

Future consumer trends in Europe - by Dr Patrick Dixon

Future consumer trends in Europe - by Dr Patrick Dixon: "How European consumers are changing, winners and losers in retail. The impact of technology, demographics and social trends on consumer behaviour, attitudes and lifestyle choices. How manufacturers, service providers and retail outlets will have to change to survive. "

President Chirac proposes rival to Google for Europe

President Chirac yesterday proposed that the French government take the initiative in helping develop a new European search engine to rival the supremacy of Google.  This will be extremely difficult given the huge budget committed by Microsoft so far, who have themselves failed to make much of an impact into the near-monopoly of Google.

 

However Google will find themselves increasingly under scrutiny as they occupy the dominant position in the world in terms of total web access.

 

In the meantime, every web master continues to try to find ways to increase profile – a task that is increasingly difficult as search algorithms become every more sophisticated, dynamically adjusting to the evolving web.