Bazaarvoice’s Social Commerce Summit London
I was pleased to be asked to speak at Bazaarvoice’s Social Commerce Summit in London. A characterful, fun and engaging day, held at The Magic Circle’s premises near Euston.
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Chairing session at The Walpole Luxury eBusiness Forum – “Luxury Online – Upside in a Cold Climate”
Oct 9, ’08
11:39 AM
I was pleased to be invited to an ‘in conversation’ and Chairing session at The Walpole’s Luxury eBusiness Forum, held at the RAC on 8 October.
Some great speakers and an interesting and engaged delegate list. As ever, the real value was in the 1:1 conversations over coffee. The take-away for me is that in these difficult times there are opportunities for brands whose focus blends quality and service. At the higher price-points value is more important than price to the more affluent customer. Empty brand promises are exposed ruthlessly online so the opportunity for strong multichannel sales can be damaged by timid or inept online activity.
Breakfast Briefing: Clearwater Corporate Finance
Sep 30, ’08
8:59 AM
I was invited to speak at a breakfast briefing hosted by Clearwater Corporate Finance by Jackie Naghten on “What makes a successful online business”. The presentation was to a group of Clearwater’s clients and contacts in the private equity space – either investors, investment managers or entrepreneurs (pre- and post-funding). Given the short time and the knowledge of the audience I focused on what I see to be the fundamentals involved in appraising a business for investment or in running an online business with a ruthless focus on value and growth (or, in today’s challenging climate, value and surviving long enough to be able to realise that value!).
The presentation covered:
- The retail context – continued growth in online, but no longer ‘free growth’ nor a ‘rising tide floating all boats’. We discussed changes in consumer buying patterns.
- “There’s no middle in eCommerce” – average, “OK” and ‘sufficient’ businesses have no place online
- Sustainable competitive positions: customer insight (if you know viscerally what your consumers want, you have a chance to survive where other companies would flounder); product (whether exclusive access or unique knowledge, presentation or pricing); and Operations (the best sausage machine). Unfortunately, there are now companies who excel in all areas, so the ‘no middle’ comment above is reinforced
- We considered the origin of ‘retail’ – slicing and dicing, retailoring and fitting to the customer, and draw from this an origin founded in service and closeness to the customer
- I emphasised that ecommerce lives as part of a multichannel world: even pure-play businesses have contact centres, logistics, sometimes print and increasingly consider shops…
- Service is fundamental to customer retention and profitability. We considered at a high level service issues from contact centres through delivery and returns and how failure in these areas is costly – and unnecessary.
It was a great session and my thanks again to Jackie and Clearwater for the invitation.
Ian Jindal: Presentation to Clearwater Corporate Finance's breakfast briefing.
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.
Chairing: IAB ‘Ask the Experts’ event on Loyalty and Cashback
Sep 24, ’08
8:59 AM
I was invited by the IAB to chair their ATE session on “Affiliate Marketing: Loyalty and Cashback” on Wednesday 24th.
I know from my recent speaking on Affiliates that the changing landscape as a result of the rise of cashback sites has created some controversy and concern, and equally from a retail perspective there’re questions as to the relative tactical versus strategic aspects of cashback. There’s no denying the responsive, even pavlovian, effects on sales that cashback promotion can achieve – but the question is about brand value, who has the relationship with the customer and whether there’s “loyalty” to anything or anyone other than getting cash back and therefore habitually cheaper prices.
To put perspectives we had:
- Richard Yendall, Chairman, The Loyalty Association (speaking as a cashback affiliate, as well as for that association)
- Helen Southgate, Head of Affiliates, DGM (looking from an agency/network perspective at issues and considerations)
- Peter Wakim, Head of Business Development, Quidco (speaking for one of the most well-known and powerful of the cashback sites)
- Matt Bailey, Head of Affiliates, iLevel (asking questions from a merchant’s perspective, but also sharing research showing that cashback vs ‘normal’ affiliates’ performances are not as generally accepted).
Beer afterwards ensured that the questions continued well after the close of formal proceedings.
The IAB’s venue is a handy, well-appointed and nicely-sized one for these 50-person events and I hope that they’ll be doing more of them in future.
Details of the event, along with speaker presentations, are on the event page, while you can see their events programme here.
Presentation to the London College of Fashion’s faculty
Sep 22, ’08
12:41 PM
I was pleased to accept an invitation from Dr Julia Gaimster to address the Faculty at the London College of Fashion on the topic of the impact of ecommerce and recent internet developments in customers’ approaches to buying fashion. In an hour’s session on 19 September 2008 we covered competitive positioning in a digital age, rich media and aspects of customer behaviour.
On an enrolment day, with the newer of the LCF’s 5000 students thronging the hallways and staircases, it was a visible and pertinent reminder of the ever-changing trends and faces in fashion and the need for the business, production, teaching, logistical and technological aspects of such an important industry to keep up with behaviour – as well as setting future trends.
It was a lively and fun session and I’m looking forward to future sessions with the wider team at LCF.
“People in Aid” – Board presentation.
Jul 23, ’08
7:03 PM
A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation to the People In Aid Board on the trends in the uses of digital and social media and how these might be used to provide improved services for the charity’s members, staff, field users and stakeholders.
People in Aid is a charity to support HR professionals and practitioners. In their words:
Promoting good practice in the management and support of aid personnelPeople In Aid is an international network of development and humanitarian assistance agencies. People In Aid helps organisations whose goal is the relief of poverty and suffering to enhance the impact they make through better people management and support
The organisation already has a number of good web properties, but very much in the “publishing” tradition: centralised information ‘resources’ that are available ‘from the source’ – not always ideal in the field, nor necessarily reflecting the way people currently work internally.
The preparation phase allowed me to get a good understanding of the issues, challenges and opportunities faced by PIA – my thanks to Ben and his colleagues for their time and ideas. The presentation itself elicited some good questions and push-back and I’m looking forward to seeing the development of their web and digital strategies.
The slide deck is linked below, on Slideshare.net.
Google Retail Summit – moderating “Scaling and Managing the $1bn Online Business”
Jul 22, ’08
7:02 PM
Google UK have convenened an interesting and senior morning on etail and ecommerce. You can see the list of speakers at the website – quite a gathering.
I’m pleased to be moderating a session on “Scaling and Managing the $1bn Online Business”. I do this with some humility since the last ecommerce business I ran (while Group eCommerce Director at Littlewoods Shop Direct) was “only” £405million. The current £:$ rate is flattering of my efforts though – $800m sounds like a lot more – but failing a slump in the value of the dollar (!) I currently do not qualify for membership of the $1bn-club. Not yet, at least 
The panellist will include Bruce Fair (MD, Kelkoo), Matthew Hardcastle (MD, Shopping.com) and Peter Fitzgerald (Retail Industry Leader, Google UK).
Speeches for Adobe and Sky
Jul 21, ’08
6:59 PM
It’s been a busy time on the speaking front, culminating in a ‘double decker’ for Adobe and then Sky.
Adobe’s Scene7 folk have initiated a series of retailer briefings and, having spoken at the first, it would have been rude not to speak again when invited The topic of this presentation was “Excellence in Online Retailing”. I opened proceedings, then Ijaz and Marty shared some of the Scene7 roadmap. Michael Ross of eCommera then gave a presentation on the “The 10Ps of eCommerce“. This was a great presentation. Michael’s dry and direct delivery was really engaging and certainly brought the 10 Ps to life. I’d read these (since we published an article on them in Internet Retailing Magazine last issue – you can see the PDF here), but seeing the presentation was certainly more fun.
I’ve put the presentation on slideshare.
Then on to Sky University for an afternoon opener on “Online Selling – a customer experience”. The day was organised by Sky for their top teir affiliates and my session was an opportunity to take a broader look at the customer landscape. It was also a good opportunity for me to ponder further the affiliate landscape – an area of increasing interest to me, to which I’ll return in later posts.
A real eye-opener for me though was a presentation from Joost de Valk, a search strategist at OnetoMarket in the Netherlands. Joost is engaged in “white hat” SEO (ie legal, well-behaved, effective SEO activities) for some major brands. Joost also knows a lot – from hearsay, no doubt – about “black hat” SEO: the sort of activities for which the word “naughty” was coined. I spend a bit of time working with client teams to improve their SEO, but I had no idea of the scale, complexity and cunning of the operations attempting to outfox Google, searches and credit-card owners. It’s an area I need to look at! Hopefully, with Joost’s help rather than a DIY remedial course in high-contact, combat SEO!
Here are my slides on Slideshare:
Speaking at “The Future of Digital Marketing”, e-consultancy – June 2008, London.
Jun 20, ’08
6:54 PM
The Future of Digital Marketing | Events | E-consultancy.com
I really enjoyed speaking on Wednesday at e-consultancy’s FODM conference. This is the 5th iteration of their ‘what’s new in online marketing’ format and the emphasis this year was less on “newness” and more on strategic importance and direction.
The roster of speakers was intimidating and the senior audience (with many clients and contacts) just added to the, ahem, ‘helpful pressure’.
It was a great opportunity to build upon some of the Digital Resolutions and similar best-practice presentations I’ve given this year and look at the underlying trends and emergent opportunites: from data, metadata, microformats, attention data (and my current love, APML), semantic data and towards a time when the data, enlivened by algorithms for use, spacial/place-awareness, contextual triggers and oodles of cunning creates a network effect – changing the nature of future marketing and engagement with customers. Long sentence.
The slides are available slideshare, but since it’s more picture than points I’ve listed some of the key sites and references below.
- Socialisr from Yell – an interesting take on making their database into a social event organising support thing.
- Microformats.org - the space for little things. Little, structured and portable things. Standards therefore.
- APML – the standard, interchange, thinking space for Attention Profiling Markup Language.
- engagd – useful and early implementations of APML. Worth bookmarking and keeping under watch.
- Tastebroker.org – a place to grab and see your APML.
- Phorm’s “Open Internet Exchange” – read, consider and see whether it’s threat, opportunity or both. And to whom…?
- TrueKnowledge – really interesting take on structured, explicit and inferred knowledge.
Media Futures Conference 2008
Jun 12, ’08
6:53 PM
Nico Macdonald and the BBC have announced The Media Futures Conference, being…
“… a one day exploration of the dynamics and trends shaping the future of media. As well as an opportunity for lively debate, the conference will feature presentations showcasing innovative projects, showing smart thinking in practice and illustrating the scope of what is possible “
No small promise then
The conference is the culmination of a year’s conversation with the BBC by Nico (of Spy.co.uk), and builds upon the regular series of Innovation Forums (fora?) and the Innovation Reading Circle (as mentioned here previously in my review of Andrew Keen’s book, Cult of the Amateur).
The website – Media Futures Conference 2008 – has information on the agenda and speakers (I’m Chairing a session on provocations).
The tickets have already sold out once so if you’re interested in attending I’d suggest you register promptly (Update: there’s also a “Waiting” list available via the ticketing page).