Commercial awareness skills are often seen and discussed by organisations as being key to success, however, few invest in the area in a focused way. In the UK over the past couple of weeks we’ve become increasingly aware of the challenges faced by the major incumbents in the grocery sector, and in particular Tesco, who…
In the first part of this article ‘A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words – stock photography & the shifting market‘ we looked at the challenges facing the stock photography market. In this second instalment we’ll take a quick look at the approaches that some of the stock photography agencies are taking to adjust the settings…
‘A picture’s worth a thousand words’, or so the saying goes. It’s a phrase that is rumoured to have come from an ancient Chinese proverb and which became more prevalent in the 20th Century. Whilst we’ve grown up used to seeing illustrated books, it’s a concept that has become even more powerful in the digital…
In the previous article we looked at two types of trust, cognitive-based trust and affect-based trust, which are based on technical competency, and emotional attachment respectively. We also acknowledged that relationships are of course made up of both links and nodes and in this article we’re going to focus on the people (the nodes) and…
We’re probably all aware of the concept of ‘six degrees of separation’. That we are all connected by six or fewer steps. From a human perspective, in a world of 7+ billion people it sounds far fetched, however, having completed a course on social and economic networks I’ve seen the mathematical proof and been forced…
Today is a big day in the UK with the Chancellor’s budget speech. Whilst he will be laying out what is a set of political policies, much of the proverbial ‘column inches’ will be focused on the underpinning economic facts, figures, and assumptions. In a recent post (‘Are you a ‘digital native’ – and how…
It’s possible that the food retailing business models reached a public tipping point today with the announcement by Morrisons that they had adjusted their strategy to compete more directly with the discount players. Another of the large traditional players Tesco also recently indicated that they were also adjusting their profitability aspirations. The market has been…
The term ‘digital native’ is increasingly being used to describe a set of skills that organisations look to have throughout their teams. But how many organisations have really thought through what they actually mean? Having asked a few people what they mean, my rough and ready research would lead me to believe that there is…
It’s estimated that the hospitality industry in the UK employs about 6% of the total working population, some 1.7m people, and accounts for £55-60bn pa. Just under a half of that figure ~£25bn relates to restaurants, ~56,000 of them if the latest estimates are true. It’s an industry sector that we all probably encounter more…
Increasingly we live in a society where we expect everything to be available instantly, 24/7/365. Yet often we take for granted the time and effort that it has taken to achieve this for each individual product or service. On another axis the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and therefore more complex. How many of us…