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Submission date for the Market Research Society conference looms. If you've an idea for a paper then best to get on with it. Hmm - better get in a couple of suggestions meself. Stephen King event organised by the APG this coming Monday night. Only there's no ref on the website. You'll have to phone them for details. Now where was I?
T his evening we had Gary Grant as an after dinner speaker talking about his Christian faith. He's the founder of the chain of Entertainer toyshops which thrive as local shops despite going up against edge of townbarnsRUS. There aren't that many independent toy shops left let alone chains of them. Well here's one of the secrets. He doesn't open on Sundays - its against his religion. And he doesn't let his employees work on Sunday either. He thinks for families to remain families everyone needs to be home on the same day.
Interesting because there are Entertainer stores in Lakeside and the Bullring in Birmingham. Conventional wisdom says that Sunday is the 2nd best trading day of the week. A lot of landlords demand 7 day opening to make the rents. Gary's stores have to do better 6 days a week than others do opening 7.
So how does Gary get away with it? Here's the theory. He has loyal customers. Who know not to bother on Sunday. So they know if they want to buy from the Entertainer when they can go and when they can't. So he has turned the Entertainer into a destination store. Not just a run of the mill store you wander into when you can't think of what else to do on Sunday and head down to the shopping centre. I'd love to prove it. But it does show there's life apart from workaholism and 24/7. What an intriguing way to beat the odds.
Look out for his next venture the Gadgetshop which he bought from the receivers - it relaunches next week as a pure online business.
John Grant's most recent book is the brand innovation manifesto which features a table of innovation ideas that can be used by brands. They have been turned into a pack of cards which you can use in workshops and by yourself. To date John has had lots of enquiries and no success in taking money and sending them out.
So he's asked me to sort it. And at last I've managed to. Planningaboveandbeyond.com goes ecommerce enabled - you'll need paypal. Point your browsers at www.planningaboveandbeyond.com and head for the shop. The URL will take you straight there. a pack of cards will cost you £25 including VAT and postage and packing. I've used them in workshops meself and they're worth every penny. Though buying a copy of the book might help as well. So I've shown you how to do that and there's also a video interview with John Grant on the same webpage talking about the book and the cards. And I attach a jpeg of the table of elements to whet your appetite. When you're using the cards you don't want to be fooling with the book.
Now I have a little breathing space I am in a position to be able to update the website at long last. One of the first things I have added is a gallery of Business Fiction books. Relevant because in recent reads I have reviewed The Marketing Code and Kingdom.com and I am all set to read and review David Taylor's Where's the Sausage. You may not have thought of fiction as a suitable area for thinking and learning about business but there's some good stuff out there and some very entertaining material as well.
This morning I looked in on Claire Lettice a planner with who I used to work at Carlson group in Putney many years ago. She's still in Putney has a pad on the Thames no less. So we sat by the river talking projects - hers involve muesli and vineyards (mine are mundane by comparison). But if this is work then well it sure beats a day job!
One of the things we discussed was the Create more than you consume idea I am now contemplating how I can turn into something more tangible. I have even secured the URL for createmore.co.uk so watch this space! It rather looked as if Claire is well ahead of the curve and planning business start up ideas that would do exactly that - help people to create more with what she was providing.
This was a facebook meet the first of its kind. The group on Facebook (you should be able to work out the name from the title of this blog!) is around the 3,000 mark. Ogilvy funded the whole thing which was a smart thing to do. They staked the basement of the Slug and Lettuce out so you had to sign in - get your photo taken with a sheet of A4 with your name and you had to sign in a second time to get a free beer. Business case wise they only need a couple of new signings from it and they'll have done very nicely saving on headhunters fees. Something like 140 people had said they would come but the numbers didn't look anything close to that. Always the problem with converting web contact to face to face - the spirit is willing but the body can't get organised. It was still easily the biggest web getogether I had been to - and remember I have organised a few of my own to drink the profits from the sales of the books on the www.planningaboveandbeyond.com now www.accountplanning.net website. So well done to Nick Fell for getting the whole thing going. I caught up with Will Humphrey but didn't manage to say hello to Rory before he left the venue having addressed the throng.
Dunno why I waited until the exhibition had nearly closed before I went but this was the sacred Text exhibition at the British Library which brought together the greatest manuscripts from the Jewish scriptures the Qu'ran and the Christian bible and put them in one room. I just caught it. And it was magnificent. Check out some of the manuscripts here.
Are you thinking that this is a minority interest? Well not really. For better or for worse the monotheistic religions which are dominated by sacred texts are on the rise and the text has never been more influential. You won't find this reflected in media coverage in the west where the image is held to be all important. And anyone who studies a sacred text is written off as a nerd or an extremist. But we have to acknowledge these texts influence the attitudes and behaviours of a significant proportion of the population of the planet. With a very direct channel between what the word says and what you're supposed to do. Furthermore we live in a golden age of scholarship. Because of the cataloguing of manuscripts and the unifying effect of global scholarship more is known about the origins of these texts than at any point since they were written.
I include Eli Wallach here because I love that bit in the Good the Bad and the Ugly where he stumbles out of a sandstorm into a gunsmith and quickly asssembles a bespoke weapon. That is not dissimilar to how I feel when I pick up a bible, check the accuracy of translation and then test the language for speech rhythms - how does the translation breathe? I don't read Hebrew but am perfectly capable of reading in Greek and Latin. So can check the text right back to manuscript level if need be. It is worth remembering that education as defined for Jewish children used to entail the memorising of the entire Torah. When I last traveled in the Middle East a verse of the Qu'ran was put on the video screen before the plane took off and a voce over declaimed it. All of this will be utterly alien to you if you live in a culture dominated by images where all the content is disposable and replaceable. But next time you fret when it takes an hour to get through airport security that you are there because of a particular interpretation of a sacred text.
In the exhibition there was a fabulous crossover of cultures between Islamic and Jewish, betwen Jewish and Christian in how the books were laid out and how they were illustrated. The earliest Qu'ran was 5th century, the earliest New testament manuscript was around 250, and there was even a fragment from the Dead Sea scrolls which would have been around AD40. The Lindisfarne Gospels, one of the greatest works of art ever produced in these islands was tucked in a corner. There was a psalm of Henry VIII which had an illustration of Henry himself in the guise of King David.
This is an aspect of human experience and culture which needs to be taken seriously. Don't make the mistake of confusing those who follow a sacred text with fundamentalists. Fundamentalists attempt to control the interpretation of the text in a single and specific way. But there are many more people than that who don't hold to a literal interpretation who nonetheless take the text very seriously and who attempt to apply the sacred texts to the way they live.
What we are seeing in the Middle East is the seeds of the destruction of Islamic fundamentalism. It won't come soon but it will be here within a century. For every kaafir who is killed several Muslims are killed. The result will be a rejection of fundamentalist Islam. How do I know this? Because this is exactly what happened in Europe after 100 years of Protestants and Catholics killing each other. Look at the constitution of the USA which banishes faith from the republic - and the culture lock we still have in Europe that religious faith is a private matter for the individual. Both came directly from the chaos of 18th century Europe. Fundamentalism will pass. But faith in the sacred texts will remain. Whether we need the illustrations reproduced on fridge magnets I will leave for you to decide!
Enough whingeing - back to business. I enjoyed this rather provocative article by the chief executive of Garlik (and former technical head of Egg) on the BBC site about how to organise for peaks of high processing. He points out that letting the system crash may be a perfectly valid IT strategy. Because if customers put it down to a network failure - the equivalent of a powercut, there won't be lasting damage. By contrast building a system which never falls over is expensive because of all the extra capacity you keep on standby. And no more likely to work on the spike when everyone is trying to withdraw their money at the same time. He also suggests that the hapless IT director may find himself in considerable demand as the only IT director who has lived through a run on a bank in real time. Well there's another way to look at it. I found it a vivid reminder that there is more to a crisis in a service business than reputation management. If you can inhibit behaviour you repress recall and attitudinal shifts - you literally can' make up your mind. I'm sure to be shouted down by those who have been queing all night outside of Northern Rock branches. Oh all right then - that's behaviour with a consequence. But throwing the keyboard at the wall and deciding you'll try to log on again in the morning may be the best thing - if you can't engage with the bank then mebbe you'll calm down - listen to the politicians - and do nothing.
Um well after an indecent interval hello. This I suppose is what ought to be called a continuity posting where I make some account of myself in the weeks since the August bank holiday at the end of August when I last posted. Without apology I plead work pressures. Facebook is absurdly easy to update with the status field. But for the last 3 weeks I have been charging around running workshops, training and a rather interesting research project. Expect some posts which will appear in the timeline in the next few days and will eventually be retrofitted to when they really happened. There's been a bit of reading and pondering which I'll be coming back to. I've had a coffee with author David Taylor about his new book Where's the sausage and his trilogy Brand Gym Brand stretch and Brand vision. And a lunch with Peter Wells who briefed me on what Nilewide are up to. Its not like I've not been up to the usual things. I just haven't had time to write about them.
Sometimes there isn't enough time to live and to write about living. What is quite interesting I think is that there hasn't been a lot of time to absorb advertising. I don't just mean I've been too busy to watch the telly. I'm not seeing DM, been travelling outside of cities so not seeing posters. Newspapers are a big disapointment these days because they mostly carry offers not advertsing so there's nothign to absorb. Not a lot of commercial radio is making it into the car. I haven't been on the internet that much and the anti popup software has ensured that when I do I don't get interupted. Advertising just isn't making it through the bubble. And I'm wondering for how many other people this is also true. What I am looking forward to is space and quality time. At which point I want to encounter some clever exchanges with brands with something interesting to say. I wonder who will find me and what they will say to me when they do.
Despite the adrenaline rush of hitting one deadline after another I'm still intensely frustrated. I need to teach myself how to use CSS and Flash. How to develop containers which instantly deposit the content to the relevant browser whether computer, PDA or mobile. Its all very well having at least 4 conferences this autumn about Web 2.0. But who's actually going to make it happen? So much talk - but where's the innovation happening?
I'm just caught between a web/blog/facebook/hi5/linkedin and a hard place.
I spotted this on a railway poster - doesn't it seem a tad removed from Camden market et al. It was a litle more familiar to me than that - the jewellery is clearly from Links of London - anything but a market stall. What's on the counter is worth at least £2000. Just a reminder that our billboards are full of photo library material but sometimes the true origin is rather different. (though spotting out of place artwork as a hobby probably makes trainspotting look terribly excciting by comparison!
