The Empty Whitecoat

Increased Innovation Drives Success in Recession

Graham Hill, newest member of the Strategyn UK team, blogs an insightful and evidence-based piece on how customer-driven innovation can help firms to beat recession.

As we enter further into the recession, companies are making ever deeper cuts in their spending. Nothing is sacred. Head count is being decimated, marketing budgets are being slashed and innovation is being curtailed. This might seem to be a logical consequence of the recession, but is it?

A McKinsey Quarterly article on Learning to Love Recessions looked at how successful 1,000 US companies were over an 18 year period, including the 1990/1 recession. It highlights the fact that companies that successfully weathered the recession significantly increased their spending on sales, on innovation and on marketing in comparison to their less succesful peers. In innovation's case, they increased their spending to 22% more than their less successful peers. The payoff from these and related investments was a 25% greater market-to-book ratio for the successful companies in the post-recession period.

It seems reasonable to conclude that increased innovation drives success during a recession.

Read the full article here...

Amazon reviewers pen irony

These customer reviews of the classic Bic Crystal Ballpoint pen (Medium, Black) on Amazon are loaded with irony and very funny....

click here to read

Here's hoping that BIC heed the call and bring out a left-handed version .....

All UK train travellers are sheep

Visit a major UK train station today and you will see hundreds of sheep on the platforms, up and down the escalators and milling about next to the ticket machines and coffee kiosks.  The stations are inundated with the white woolly new zealand beasts. You cant avoid them.

But these are no ordinary everyday run-of-the-mill sheep. No. These sheep - on posters and leaflets plastered all over our train stations (and now on 30 second TV ads) - are meant to symbolise the ordinary, every day, run-of-the-mill British train passenger who "follows the herd" and is too "dumb " to purchase their tickets in advance, in order to save money on their already-exorbitant train fares.

see tvad here : http://www.tellyads.com/show_movie.php?filename=TA7398

Part of a "campaign" by independent ticketing company The Trainline.com to persuade people to book tickets in advance online (and for them to pocket a £1 booking fee and a £2.50 Credit Card fee in the process), the whole thing smacks of superciliousness, smugness and overwhelming hubris.

British rail passengers have suffered long enough with high prices, complicated fare systems (now thankfully simplified - to a relative degree) and shamefully poor reliability. Now - to add insult to injury - we are all portrayed as dumb idiots unable to make smart choices for ourselves.

If brands wish to make our lives easier by signposting a better option or a deal that is in our interests, they shouldn't label us as foolish for the old behaviour they're trying to change. Besides, if Trainline.com really wish to act in our best interests, then they should direct us to http://www.nationalexpresseastcoast.com and http://www.virgintrains.co.uk where rail passengers can enjoy no booking fees, no registration, no opt-out travel insurance, no postage fees, easier site navigation and no sheep to push past. Shear heaven.