Category: Digital

Is personalisation really any good?

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A tweet in my time line caught my eye last week. Someone I follow was calling out Sainsbury’s for giving her an offer for pork sausages, despite her having bought kosher margarine recently.

What surprised me more was Sainsbury’s explanation.

Their claim that vouchers are generated randomly smelt distinctively of the horseshit variety.

Holy grail

The holy grail of modern marketing is being able to send such hyper-targeted communications and offers to customers that they continually return to your brand on a never-ending, subliminal journey of discovery and purchase.

The reality – as the above example shows – is somewhat different. Continue reading “Is personalisation really any good?”

MadMinds Europe 2016: Digital is hard, but fun

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I’ve just spent a couple of days at the MadMinds Europe 2016 conference, where I spoke, but also listened to some excellent presentations and people about their successes and frustrations.

Here are 6 insights I gleaned from the 2 days…

1. Digital is blooming hard work

There’s occasionally the external perception that when someone launches something new,  or even creates a new app, that it took just a few weeks.

In fact, I still hear surprise from non-digital folks that you can’t just ‘knock up a new microsite’ in a couple of weeks, much less whether it’s even the right idea.

Continue reading “MadMinds Europe 2016: Digital is hard, but fun”

Forget the big idea – start with the user

Steve Jobs
We think of Apple as being the great modern-day innovators, but actually what they do is take an initial idea – more often than not one that a competitor has created – and then improve on it, based on customer needs.

Even in 2016, this is something that so many brands still fail to do.

In her book Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly, Bernadette Jiwa starts one chapter with this spot-on quote from Steve Jobs.

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it … And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with ‘What incredible benefits can we give to the customer, where can we take the customer?’ Not starting with ‘Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then [ask] how are we going to market that?’

Steve Jobs