May 2009
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Day May 14, 2009

Masters status conferred on our retail qualification

A while ago we launched the Post-Graduate Diploma in Internet Retailing. The programme was developed, in conjunction with Econsultancy.com, to support the skills and career development of multichannel retail professionals. The qualification spans the gamut of etail activity – from buying, sourcing and category management, to online marketing by route of operations, IT and logistics.

On Tuesday we were challenged by the accreditation board of Manchester Metropolitan University to assess whether the programme was at a sufficiently high level and with a suitable supporting academic framework to be worthy of being awarded Masters status.

After three and a half hours of grilling by the panel and external assessors we were incredibly gratified to be told that we had been approved as a Masters programme.

Congratulations are due to David Bird, Director at MMU’s Business School and Craig Hanna, Training Director at Econsultancy.com, both of whom worked incredibly hard to make the programme ready for assessment.

We’ve now got to update the webpage and revise marketing materials to reflect that this is now (we think) the UK’s first and only…

“MSc in Internet Retailing”.

Speaking at the Westfield “World Retail Study Tour”

Westfield (a client) organise a world retail study tour for Australian businesses to visit peers, examplars and trend-setters in the US and Europe.

On the London leg of the tour – following a period in the US – the delegates had visited key retail stores, niche retailers, characterful areas of London and for a day heard presentations from major retailing figures.

I was pleased to be able to open proceedings this morning with a presentation on ‘the UK online consumer’ and trends and issues in multichannel retail.

As it was a private presentation there are no slides available.

Speaking at BBDO University

Following my presentation to the Innovation in Retail Forum I was pleased to accept an invitation to speak to the BBDO U meeting, held just outside Paris.bbdou.png

The event brought the leadership from the AMV, BBDO, Proximity family together to discuss digital trends, issues and opportunities. The team did a great job to pull together some excellent speakers (some of whom I was lucky to hear) as well as some ‘externals’ (me and Google).

I developed some of my themes on the demanding digital customer and approaches to exploiting the ‘attention economy’. In a very engaged Q&A session afterwards, and over lunch, it was good to get so many well-informed, enthusiastic and challenging questions.

No slide deck from this event due to its confidential nature, but there was some real-time commentary from the twitterati in the group – hashtag is #bbdou