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It’s all mobile, dummy: Part 1

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One of my big learnings from last year was actually something I didn’t learn at all.

Yes, I know, it sounds odd, but hear me out.  Sometimes you learn something that, with hindsight, is completely obvious.  It was right in front of your nose.  For me it was about mobile and the importance of mobile in the future of marketing.

Where is the first place consumers read email?  Answer: 50% of the time it is on a mobile device.  A great stat, yet marketers just don’t seem to have understood this. Still.

The other day I took a screenshot of my inbox on my mobile.  On the screen were 5 messages.  All of those messages had completely forgotten that 50% of their audience will have a different experience as they’ll receive it on their mobile.

My 5 emails all started with the phrase “If you can’t read this email” or “you have been sent this email“.  The first few words of the email have been eaten by the Compliance Department, who don’t seem to use mobile devices or care for a consumer’s experience.

If you couple this with the epidemic of shortening attention spans, you end up with RDS, or Rapid Delete Syndrome.  This syndrome is where a user looks at their inbox and just deletes emails based on:

  1. Who sent them
  2. The first 30 characters of the header.

Yup, that’s right. All that work by the Design and Usability teams is for nothing, because your mobile device stripped it all out and the user deleted the email before even reading any of it.

Genius.

Now this has been pointed out to you, you will begin to see yourself do it, and research we have done backs it up.  The problem here is not whether you are mobile, it’s whether they are mobile.  And they are.  Very much so.

So it’s time to rethink your world for mobile, make sure you are on the seed list and look at your email not as you intended it to be but as it was filtered by your mobile device.  Then, and only then, will you stop wasting the time of both your company and consumers.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.

Big Baloney

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On my computer I have 187GB of photos and videos.  Each photo is tagged with the camera settings, date, time and place it was taken along with some information about the people that are in the photo.

If you were really smart, you would be able to deduce from this where and when I take my holidays, who I go with, what other places I visit and a lot of other information about me.

My first PC had a hard drive of just 10MB. That means that you would need more than 18,000 of my first PCs just to store my current photo collection, at a rate of just 2-3 photos per computer.

That’s a lot of stuff.  If you were to analyse my photos further you could probably uncover a lot more information.  If you were to append other data about those photos from other sources you might be able to tell what the weather was like in Disney when I went there and it might be possible to tell how much money I spent at Disney.

In short, you can take my 187GB and probably turn it into thousands more Gigabytes.

Collectively that’s called Big Data.  And the world is going Big Data crazy.

At the recent DMA Conference in Las Vegas the title was Big Data and a series of highly paid (and quite boring) people were trotted out to tell their stories.  None of which defined big data in the same way or gave any answers to burning questions.

Everywhere you look people are adding bigness to their data, appending all sorts of information to their records.  For instance, I have an add-in for Outlook that shows me a photo and profile of the person who has sent me an email pulled from LinkedIn or Facebook.

But, be careful what you wish for. Big Data is precisely that. It’s a load of numbers and letters all rammed together from different places.

Big Data does not mean big insight. It does means big consulting bills and probably a big headache.

Why?

Well you don’t need more data, you need more answers. Answers to questions you have never been able to ask. Answers to questions you haven’t thought of. Answers that will give you an edge.

All this focus on Big Data is great, but I am not convinced that this is anything more than a ploy to sell you hardware and consulting, and not solutions that your business needs.

I think the challenge should be to find good answers from using regular sized data to its full potential. I mean, what’s the point of making your data “big” in the future if you never used “small” data effectively in the present?

To my mind, you don’t need to focus on the size of the data or the tools that you get to analyse it, but on the quality of the insight that you can gather as a result.  And, so far, I haven’t heard anyone talk about how they have dramatically moved their business forward as a result of big data. We help businesses do just that, but with insight, every day.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight

The death of You

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The French are struggling.

After years of battling against English cultural invasions and Quarter Pounders a change is creeping in to their language. And it is one that I think should make us all pause for thought.

In most Latin based languages the word you can either take the formal version or informal version. Tu and vous in French. Du and sie in German.

The difference really is about how well you know the person. I remember (and it is a long time ago now) that one of the first things I was taught in German class was how to ask “May I call you du?” It was way to show your respect to a stranger, while still being friendly enough offer a formal conversation if they preferred.

The growth of internet communications, especially social media, has seen the death of formal language. A philosophy of equality amongst peers has seen use of sie and vous dwindle and the growth of informal du and tu rocket. It’s a bit like the death of dear in English and the standardisation of hi as a greeting.

This move has crept into our language (and I was a prime mover, which is why I am thinking about it). The question, however, is whether we should stand up against the demise of traditional greetings or move with the times and embrace it.

The move towards the ever-familiar seems to have sneaked in alongside the move towards a more counter-cultural way of doing things. Look at the number of companies that almost expect office staff, and even managers, to show up in jeans. It is met with raised eyebrows if an employee comes in wearing a tie!

The jeans movement of the 70’s was founded in the West Coast of America when engineers and developers in Silicon Valley took a stand against “the suits” of the East Coast. The only real advantage to their movement was that if you were going to stay awake for 2 days writing code or building the next amazing thing you only needed to change your t-shirt, wash and you were good to carry on.

The problem is now that the counter-culture has become the culture. Not only that, but when was the last time a member of this counter culture stayed up for 36 hours working on a particularly fascinating business problem? Exactly.

So what is the next move for counter culture? Pyjamas? Or will there be a counter to the counter culture which heralds the return of the suit and tie. I, for one, would prefer to do business in the latter.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.

Building brands in the corners

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On my way in to work today, I was trying to negotiate my way out of a difficult junction when a lorry stopped to let me go. The truck had the word “Palletways” written on the side. What a nice thing to do. What a nice company.

It got me to thinking about another time earlier in the summer. I had been in a taxi that was making its way through London when the driver had to brake sharply and take emergency measures to avoid hitting a van that had pulled out in front of us. The van, a prisoner transport van, had the words “Serco-Wincanton” written on the side of it. As my taxi driver pulled alongside to complain (pleasantly I might add), he was met with a tirade of foul-mouthed abuse.

Recently I travelled across the Atlantic with Virgin Atlantic, an airline that prides itself on being a little different. While washing my hands in the toilet, I noticed that the corners of the washroom were dirty and dusty, and looked like they hadn’t been cleaned for years.

It got me to thinking; what makes a brand?

It is different from what makes a successful company. To make a successful transport company you need to be able to get goods from A to B, on time, in one piece and at a fair price. That goes without saying. That’s what gets you in the game; it is the price of entrance.

But what makes a successful brand is found in the corners of the toilets and in having the courtesy to let people go in traffic. It is the little things that demonstrate the real opinion that companies have of their customers. The power is in motivating the person who could choose to do the little job or who could choose to just leave it. It’s also in motivating the people who check that those people have done their job, and make it possible for them to do that job in the first place.

It is in the corners and in the small details that the real drive of the business or a team to deliver its vision is demonstrated. The fact that those details are taken care of is indicative of the attitudes, not of the driver or the cleaner, but of the whole company, including the senior management.

It has been my thesis for a long time that these small details are the ones that should matter the most to management. They are the ones that are the most expensive. In the case of the “Serco-Wincanton” van, within seconds of the driver shouting foul-mouthed abuse at my driver, the prisoners that he was carrying in the back of his van started shouting and banging on walls, being abusive. The onward consequences of that probably would have been quite costly. Much more costly than the extra 30 seconds the van driver could have taken to just nudge his way out into the traffic, rather than simply pull out at full speed.

And the proof of my thesis was shown on the flight across the Atlantic. A flight delayed by 30 minutes. Why? Small details. The previous Captain had failed to log the fact that the plane had a huge dent on the front of it, and no one on the ground had bothered to log it either. So it was only noticed when the incoming Captain did his pre-flight inspection. He had to get engineering out to check it, and this all had to be relayed to the paying customers.

It didn’t make me very comfortable about the condition of the engines, I can assure you. The same attitude that couldn’t be bothered to clean the corners of the toilets, couldn’t be bothered to call in a dented plane.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.

Not the O word

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Summer 2012 and the world has descended upon London.

It is our chance to show everyone what this country is made of – and I have to say so far, so good!

For those of you that are reading my blog for the first time, you probably don’t know that when I see something wrong, I point it out. I try to do so constructively, but it is pointless walking through life and simply accepting stupidity.

But on this occasion I have to give us a slap on the back.

The other day I flew into Heathrow’s Terminal 5. This place has been a constant source of pain for me since it opened in 2008. In fact, I was one of those people who took 2 hours to clearthrough from a flight before.

This week however, the busiest week Heathrow has ever seen, it took me 20 minutes from the second the door of the plane opened until I walked out of the baggage hall. It was astonishing. Everything worked like clockwork. A great first impression for those arriving in London.

In fact, working like clockwork seems to be the order of the week. An extra 200,000 people worked their way through the capital today and got through in good time.

However, lots of London businesses have been saying that the city is like a ghost town, with tourists not going to the big event opting to spend their money elsewhere, fearing the predicted transport meltdown.

That could be a reason for the only negative in my experience; it almost felt a little over-staffed. But that is nothing for me to complain about, as everyone seemed to be willing to leap into action, eager to help.

I guess, as the summer progresses and we see an even greater impact of sports on the national psyche, things might start to unravel into chaos, but not yet. Not for me. London is ready to welcome to world.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.