Understanding people, customers and citizens has never been more important. Our hyper-connected lives bring us closer to politics, entertainment, celebrity culture and businesses like never before. How we are influenced and who we trust is highly fragmented and distributed across our social networks and the digital platforms connecting us to one another. So how do…
The prospect of the disruption of AdTech is a very real prospect as we head into 2018. However, back in in 2013 I gave a presentation at MediaTel about how the digital marketing landscape had to evolve. I talked about how personalisation in advertising is leading to an uncanny valley effect which causes negative brand…
It’s not surprising that some startups, consultancies and innovation teams take shortcuts when collecting primary customer and market insights. The best innovation strategy will put the customer front and centre of the solution space. So why are some of the key champions of innovation dismissive of market research? Eric Ries, author of the “Lean Startup”…
I recently contributed to the Co-ops customer data strategy. Cooperatives as a business model are really interesting for a world where trust in institutions is declining. Wikipedia defines cooperatives as: “A cooperative is a legal entity owned and democratically controlled by its members. Members often have a close association with the enterprise as producers or…
With every change in business, technology and regulation comes an opportunity to innovate and differentiate. With consumers mistrusting brands with their personal data and the GDPR only a year away – now is the time to embrace the opportunity ahead. However, there are a lot of ideas that lack imagination, creativity and good sense. A…
The one thing we are never short of nowadays is information or “expert” opinion. Last year was a landmark year for many reasons. The US election and Brexit re-affirmed the need to challenge everything. The polls failed us yet again and fake news pervaded our lives like never before. Even in the business world, there…
The future of loyalty will look very different to what it has over the past 20 years. The debate is growing about how effective loyalty schemes are. And there is mounting evidence that younger, more digitally savvy consumers are less brand loyal and more motivated by digital customer experiences. With digital assistants on the horizon…
I first wrote this to kick off Citizenme’s newsletter about disruption and innovation in the data economy. This is the first issue about how data is disrupting marketing. If you like it you can subscribe here. The digital and data driven economy is reshaping all areas of the marketing wheel from market research to advertising.…
I gave a talk recently at Crowdsourcing Week about innovation and empowerment in the data economy. I contended that we currently exist in an unbalanced data economy. Consumer trust in how brands use personal data is extremely low. Internet users are opting out, with half a billion ad blockers installed globally. Regulators are tightening data…
I was recently invited to be a guest speaker at Ipsos MORI. Here is my talk about digital disruption, digital rights and innovation in the marketing and insights industry.
Millennials and Gen Z are challenging brand’s existing customer engagement strategies. It is well documented how differently the young use social media. Their hyper-connected lives is changing the way they consume information and subsequently how they are influenced and how they influence. Some research I was involved in recently showed that under 25 year-olds naturally,…
Working at a startup gives you fresh perspective on what concepts like “strategy” really mean. Having spent most of my career as a consultant, much of my work has informed corporate and product strategy. Living, breathing and executing on a strategy is a very different thing. Quite early on I experienced a conflict in thinking.…