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…
‘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…
Following on from my recent article on the challenges in the broadcast media space, it was interesting to see the data released by Nielsen SoundScan relating to music consumption trends. It showed that in the first half of the year there’s been an almost 12% drop in digital album sales, alongside a 13% drop in…
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…
I’m sure you’ll all have picked up the recent stories around Amazon and Google relating to delivery drones and driverless taxis. Whilst it’s too early to tell whether these are pure fantasy or will one day be a normal part of life, it does raise an interesting topic from an online retail business model perspective.…
The process of making a cup of coffee is about as simple as a task gets. That’s not to say producing the perfect crema doesn’t have its fair share of innovation, science and technique, but ultimately it’s a repeatable, mechanistic process. It’s a market which from the last available research, which was for 2012, grew…
In the age of ‘big data’ we see supermarkets as being at the leading edge of harvesting consumer information in order to drive their business, but are they missing a trick? In the UK, Tesco says that there are over 15 million Clubcard users, and Nectar states that it has over 19 million users. In…
One of the key battlegrounds between Google and Apple over the next few months will be in the area of music streaming. The companies are likely to take subtly different approaches in terms of service offering and business model. Google’s recently launched ‘Play Music All Access’ is a subscription based service similar to Spotify and…
When most people hear the words ‘hacker’ or ‘hack’ they probably conjure up an image of a teenager trying to hack into a government mainframe or a hardened criminal trying to get into a banks computer network. Such an image is of course only one interpretation of those words and over the weekend TechCrunch hosted the Disrupt…
One of the great examples of recent time that is used when people talk about innovation is the iPhone, however, in recent times the iPhone has been under stiff competition from other handset manufacturers and platform providers. It is widely acknowledged that the last iPhone didn’t really wow the world in the way that previous…