Whilst the Chip Shop Awards is certainly a tongue-in-cheek affair and definitely not to be taken too seriously there is no doubt that the competition is just as fierce as at any other similar industry event. Here is an all-too-frequent chance for the creatives to really let rip without limits. No deadline, no brief and no client breathing down your neck or imposing ’sensible’ limits. In short, every creative team’s dream!

So, yes, we are pretty chuffed with ourselves. I’ve long believed that we have an amazingly talented, bright, creative bunch of people within the business and to prove on the Nation’s stage that we are every bit as capable of producing ideas as some of the big London outfits is extremely gratifying. And, the best part is, we didn’t even send the best stuff we had because we thought it was too good to ‘waste’ and instead decided to hold some of it back for further development!

So, in a sense, bold as it sounds, it was a win for the second team. Next year we’ll have to really dig deep and see if we can’t bag ourselves the crème de la crème – ‘The Big Chip’.

Until then, here’s a link to the winning entries. Enjoy!

http://www.thedrum.co.uk/news/2011/06/08/22278-chip-shop-awards-2011-big-chip-award-goes-to-topshop-ad/

Social media is an extremely interesting phenomenon, in that its essentially just good old word of mouth but turbo charged via the power of technology.  Therefore, techniques that would have worked well in a traditional media sense can often become extremely effective social media campaigns. What you need more than anything to get social working is something interesting to say! (For interesting read genuinely interesting, funny, shocking, amazing, frightening, etc, etc) It’s extremely difficult to get social media working in any meaningful way if there is nothing that people want to share about your brand. So you have to create great content. Publish a report. Hold an event. Pull off a stunt or a great new business coup. This is where the world of social media blends with the world of PR quite nicely. Anything that would have been a great PR piece is an ideal starting point for a social media campaign. The challenge then is to figure out how to best amplify the campaign via the various social channels available to get maximum exposure.

Q: What is the best way to reach new customers through social media?

There is a saying within the social media community that it’s very difficult to create a community from scratch, but there are existent communities out there surrounding almost any topic or interest that can be tapped into and exploited. That would be a great starting point. But think laterally. If you manufacture pork pies or smoked haddock there may not be a specific community of people blogging about your exact product, but there are plenty of food lovers out there and some very active discussions going on around all aspects of food preparation, recipes, local produce etc that could provide great springboards for your initial forays into the social scene.

Q: Is social media just a tool for brand promotion or can it be used in other ways?

In a lot of ways I’d probably suggest that brand promotion is perhaps one of the more difficult things to pull off via social media, or at least brand promotion in isolation. Social is fantastic for generating and sharing things like reviews, testimonials and for keeping in touch with existing customers. Of course there is an element of brand promotion in all of those activities, but it’s a much deeper brand experience than just seeing a piece of content and being entertained for a few seconds or minutes. Often we are hoping that existing customers will share their experiences – which is a very powerful way of winning new business, but of course demands that the whole customer experience – from start to finish – was good in the first place! This is why we say that social goes all the way through the business. It shouldn’t really be thought of as just a branding or even just a marketing tool. It can be used as a customer service tool, a research tool and can – and maybe will as we go forward – become one of the driving forces helping us plan the look and feel of our entire businesses around the actual (as opposed to perceived) needs of our customers!

Q: What are the potential pitfalls of social media?

I mentioned earlier that social media is a lot like word of mouth – and they both come in two flavours! Take the old adage that a happy customer tells maybe one or two people whilst a disgruntled or disappointed customer tells 10-15. Now apply the kinds of multiplication factors that technology can bring to the table and you can see how this can go horribly wrong if you upset your lovely new social media aware consumers! Case in point was the famous United Airlines ‘United breaks guitars’ debacle. Whereby a deeply disappointed United passenger decided to write a song about the fact that United Airlines broke his guitar and were ‘reluctant’ to deal with the matter. He then posted this song (complete with accompanying video) on YouTube, where it received over 3 MILLION views in the first 10 days (http://mashable.com/2009/07/15/united-breaks-guitars/) and, as I sit typing this, has now reached 9,388,596 views in total. That’s a lot of musicians not flying on United ever again!

Q: Don’t social media sites such as Facebook carry big risks in terms of reputation – you could be exposed to very public criticism of your products?

In short, yes. And there is nothing that you can do about it. However, this is NOT a reason to stay clear of the social space – far from it. What you need to understand is that, if you are creating bad experiences and upsetting you customers, they ARE going to go online and share this information on blogs, review sites, Facebook, YouTube or wherever they can vent their spleen. The only difference being you will be blissfully unaware about it…. Until it’s too late!

The key here is to be AWARE of what is being said about your brand

in these channels. First of all, listen. You can use social monitoring tools these days to collate ‘mentions’ of your brand or other key words or phrases across the social media spectrum. Once you understand what the perception is currently, you have a chance to do something about it. In some ways this could be THE single most important use of social media for businesses – to monitor, listen to and respond to chatter that already exists around the brand. This is real time, 100% genuine customer feedback, and it’s all yours for a lot less than the cost of one (usually ineffective and often downright misleading) artificially staged customer focus group.

Q: How can you guard against feeding information to competitors?

That’s a very good question and one that’s not all that easy to answer directly. Anything that you allow into the social space AND a lot of what you don’t publish yourself but others do, is instantly available to millions to share and distribute as they see fit.

I listened to Doug Gurr (CEO of ASDA) speak at a recent Multi Channel Retail event about how social media leaves businesses nowhere to hide. He envisaged a world of ‘total price and service transparency’ driven by social sharing, reviews, price comparison engines and customer testimonials.

In essence, if this really happens, it could change the way that business thinks about marketing and brands completely. With playing fields being levelled to such an extent, true value to the consumer gets put right back at the heart of the organisation. If the product isn’t the best in the market place you won’t be able to charge a premium for it. If your service is second rate, then you will be found out and no one will pay top dollar. The only way to go here is once again to embrace the full impact of customer feedback and do something about it – and quickly!

Never before have consumers had so much power to literally make or break the reputations of businesses almost overnight. No amount of traditional branding or positive PR is going to be able to stem the flow of genuine feedback from real customers. This represents a huge challenge to us all, but also, for those willing to tackle the issues head on and make changes boldly, possibly the most cost effective and exciting marketing tool at our disposal.

We all know that Christmas trading performance can literally make or break the year’s results, or sometimes the entire businesses. Yet I believe that online opportunities are still being massively underestimated – or often times just plain ignored – precisely and ironically due to the heightened focus (not to mention pressure) in other areas.

But what does Christmas mean to your business? Are you set up to capitalise on all the available opportunities? Are you even aware of what those opportunities are – particularly from a digital or multi-channel perspective?

With all of the above in mind, here’s my early Christmas present to you, in the form of my ‘5 top tips for multi-channel festive domination’ in the run up to Christmas 2010.

1. Understand the scale of the opportunity.
Use analytics, research and industry trends in an attempt to properly understand what a multi-channel Christmas 2010 looks like for your business. Too many times opportunities are missed simply because no one in the business really fully appreciates the scale of what is potentially on the table. Believe me, spending the last 12 years in digital I’ve seen this happen A LOT and it would make me weep in frustration – if I hadn’t already run out of tears many, many years ago. Please, please take the time to understand what all those numbers could mean to your turnover and more importantly, bottom line, figures for the year.

2. Plan to out-think the competition this year…
Fortunately it’s not too late to get back in the game – although you have left it a little late to get started. Take a long, hard look at your Christmas plans and figure out how a multichannel approach could help you to amplify and compliment your existing silly season marketing efforts. What could you do differently this year in an attempt to out think the competition, as opposed to merely trying to out shout them? Media is expensive, whilst a dollop of creativity is a great leveller of playing fields. Think outside the box! Consider some different approaches. Maybe you don’t have to spend £10M carpet-bombing us with the same TV ad 40 times a day to get cut through?

(I’m not denying this works – just suggesting that, in 2010, there may be more elegant, cost effective and higher impact ways of reaching your target audience. No, I do not mean direct mail.)

3. Understand your analytics
Maybe this should be ranked as tip number one – as the number of organisations still paying lip service to the idea of using ‘web analytics’ is simply frightening. Not only are many businesses failing to use analytics effectively, quite often they haven’t even decided what it is that they should be measuring in the first place! The problem is, I think, that in the online world we have so much data at our disposal that we often become overwhelmed. Where to start first?

Well, a good place to start is by defining some really simple but critically important KPIs for your business. In our collective experience the number one sin in analytics is not focusing in on and understanding which numbers really matter the most.

The second cardinal sin would be a tendency to aggregate things like conversion rates and CPA targets across wildly differing product lines, or in most cases, across the entire business. Whilst this approach can offer a general indicator of overall performance, this is one area where the extraordinary granularity of online reporting really comes into its own. For example, its no use targeting an over-all CPA target of £50 across the business if 20% of sales comes from low margin, low value accessories. Unless, of course, its part of a larger strategy based on lifetime value of the customer etc… in which case your CRM / Referral and Social Media strategies all need to be geared up to driving that long-term value and measured accordingly to make certain that the profit is indeed coming back at some point in the equation!

I seem to have strayed from the point a bit here, but what I am trying to say is that the world of analytics is a complex one, and the numbers can often be misleading.

Considering this data is used to make critical business decisions about marketing activity and site redevelopment it really does warrant the attention of senior managers – whom I would encourage to ask as many difficult and probing questions as possible until they are completely satisfied that they a) understand what is going on and b) are convinced that they have correct, useful data upon which to base such decisions.

At this point in time the above scenario (senior management taking an interest in setting up reporting frameworks) is extremely rare, and this vital piece of work is often left to a junior ecommerce manager or assistant with little insight into or understanding of the real mechanics of the business.

4. Ramp up your visibility on search engines.
Increasingly, people start their multi-channel shopping journeys in cyber space. As more and more potential customers flood into the market in the coming months, search volumes rocket. Make certain that you are visible to these early stage researchers in order to get a shot at the sale when they eventually do decide to buy – be that online, from your catalogue or, heaven forbid, by intrepidly braving the British winter and actually turning up in one of those beloved ‘physical store’ thingies of yours. Yes, don’t worry we still love your stores!
(**After all, they give us intrepid Christmas shoppers somewhere nice and warm to hide when it’s raining or snowing outside, meaning that we can Google the price comparison engines in relative comfort to see where we could buy your stuff cheaper! So that’s nice. By the way, ever thought about installing free WI-FI? C’mon, this 3G is running like a dog. I can barely manage to upload the photo of that Sony plasma TV I just took to the Amazon instant search app! How frustrating!)

5. Systematically optimise your onsite experience and conversion rate
So now we have a good understanding of how our multi-channel audience are moving between and interacting with the various on and off line manifestations of our organisation or brand. So what? How do we get more of them and how do we sell them more stuff?

Again, whilst doubling your media budget could be a tad daunting, often times massive improvements in onsite user experience and ultimately conversion-to-sale can be achieved by investing relatively inconsequential sums into effective testing and onsite conversion optimisation.

The other upside to this approach – apart from the hardly inconsequential effect of increasing the ‘’bang for buck’ value of pretty much all of your existing marketing activity – is that your site visitors also get an improved experience and therefore are more likely to return and tell others!

It’s not unusual to be able to drive double-digit percentile improvements relatively quickly using simple, tried and tested methods. Yet, to this day, very few businesses take this really seriously – instead choosing to continue to rely on ‘gut instinct’ or on occasion, what colour the chairman or MD’s wife thinks the ‘buy now’ button should be.
(Err, yes. It still happens.)

In short, instigate a program of regular onsite measurement, testing and improvement. Flirt with A/B split tests or go the whole hog and commit to a long, wholesome relationship with multivariate testing. But whatever you do and however you measure it, do it systematically and do it regularly.

So there you have it. Five fairly broad-brush pointers towards a more prosperous, better integrated and ultimately more profitable Christmas trading season. To reiterate, it’s not too late to make a decision to make 2010 the year that you do things significantly differently and really make the multichannel approach pay dividends.

Wishing you all the best with your Christmas preparations!

Mark.

Personalisation is key to keeping the consumer engaged with your brand, and therefore must remain at the heart of your digital strategy.

Calling on some of the best ‘cult’ status films from the last decade for illustration, here are a few insights that might help it all become clear.

1. Rita, Sue and Bob Too – know your audience
Find out who your target audiences are; every variation, then ask yourself why they choose your brand, and how it is you can help. Do they want information? To purchase? Or simply want interaction with the brand? Anticipate their needs and begin building your relationship from day one. Offer them related products or give them suggestions i.e. ‘other customers also viewed…’ Also examine where your customers are in their buying cycles and present content to them that will suit their needs.

2. Seven – understanding decision making
The main component to consider for any online business, is the ‘end-user’. Users are the central ‘cog’ in any online business, around which the website should revolve. Every brand needs to understand why their users make the decisions they do, in order to predetermine an effective strategy which will lead consumers towards purchasing, engaging and re-visiting.

3. It’s a Wonderful Life – ensure efficient customer care
Greet them every time they log in and be just as accessible online as you would in person. Ensure you employ plenty of customer service reps to answer calls throughout the day, just as you would a sales assistant 9-5. Aim to respond to all email queries within the working day, if not sooner. Personalise the e-mail, attaching a contact name, e-mail address, and phone number to use if your customer needs further help. Integrate an application on your website so customers can leave their contact number for you to call them back..there are many options out there to make people feel like you really want to service them.

4. The Matrix – create a virtual reality
Taking personalisation quite literally, look to computer games for inspiration, turning your customers into their very own virtual self. Allow their virtual character to roam the site. For fashion brands why not enable customers to key in their body dimensions and shop to suit those? Create a custom mannequin within your online store and allow the customer to try on outfits. For non clothing brands, provide something which allows the customer to test your product just as they would instore. The importance is in providing the shop experience online, so customers get a ‘feel’ for the product without actually touching it.

5. Human Traffic – go overboard with social interaction
Websites are now required to be communication channels, ways in which the customer can engage in a conversation with the brand itself. Social media alone is by far the most relevant example of free advertising through word-of-mouth. Keep up to date with social media, keep your status updates and tweets regular and relevant. Provide advice, offers and exclusive opportunities to your followers. Allow customers to chat to one another about the products available, comparing previous purchases and discussing future ones. This will lead to recommendations being made.

6. To Kill a Mockingbird – treat every customer equally
Anything that is offered online must be honored instore, for example online gift cards and certificates. Reassure the customer that any item will be possible to return both through the post or at one of its stores and that refunds and exchanges will be honored efficiently, regardless of the place of purchase. This is about reassurance to put your customers at ease any remove any objections they might have about shopping with you online.

7. Me, Myself & Irene – ‘individualise’ your customers
Customers may have similar interests, but remember they are individuals. Add personalised touches to your consumer interaction that are individual to them such e.g. mailers, offering birthday discounts or gifts. When new products launch related to their previous purchases, send them a message ‘thought you may be interested in this…’ Customers love to feel valued, so give them something back.

8. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – user-generated content
It is widely acknowledged that adding customer reviews to a website has direct benefit. Customers want to feel part of the brand and therefore deserve acknowledgment for taking time to provide an opinion on your product. Personally thank everyone for their review, but be creative, think of another media other than email. By publishing this, the customer is becoming part of your team, so treat them like it.

9. 300 (IMAX) – enrich your media
Take your audience on a customer journey using rich media such as videos, zoomable images, and 360-degree views. Generate an emotional attachment which will resurface whenever they are reminded of the brand; be it through conversation or sight of the logo. Create a lasting impression by tapping into a variety of senses, making your website the most memorable out there.

10. The Italian Job – consider the finer details
Don’t go to all the effort prior to purchase and then forget the rest. Review your checkout process to ensure it’s not too complicated or long winded. Unnecessary information requirements will just put the customer off. Allow the customer to track their purchase easily online and over the phone. Really consider attention to detail where your packaging is concerned. Mirror your brand, its image and audience with its packaging – quality products deserve quality wrapping for quality people.

By knowing your online audience and understanding what it is they really want, you can create a lasting impression, build a lifetime relationship and dramatically increase repeat business. Whilst the perfect customer experience cannot guarantee an instant sale, it certainly helps.

Join the cult of ‘customer lovers’, give them what they want, and we’re pretty sure you’ll be hooked on the results.

Well, after all this time, and a not inconsiderable amount of frustration, I think I’ve finally realised the answer – or at least maybe a significant part of the actually very, very obvious answer.

It’s because we, the digital sector as a whole, still have and awful lot of growing up to do. We quite simply don’t appear credible to these people and therefore aren’t being taken seriously.

Think about it for a minute. We work in an industry where the average age of an account manager is maybe 23. A ‘senior’ account manager will be typically 26-28 and it’s perfectly possible to find ‘account directors’ in their early thirties or younger, with maybe as little as 4-5 years experience under their belt.  It’s endemic within the industry and it’s definitely not doing us any favours.

Of course we understand digital implicitly, almost instinctively even. We’ve been raised on it. Some of our own staff could probably spell out CPA, ROI and PHP in their alphabetti-spagetti before they could walk.

But seriously, can you imagine what the archetypal scruffy looking, stubbly, jeans wearing, twenty eight-year-old, ‘senior account manager’ looks and sounds like to a typically beleaguered client under pressure to deliver against aggressive sales targets?

And what about when they subsequently meet your twenty five year old ‘head of development’ who reminds them a bit of their grandson who also ‘mucks about with computers for a living’?

Any wonder they aren’t 100% confident in handing over a couple of million pounds worth of precious marketing budget?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting for a minute that these fine digital people aren’t up to the job. We have some of the very best, highly trained, super-motivated people in the business, as I’m certain do many of our contemporaries. It’s just that we are all so bloody YOUNG!

It’s an old adage that people not only buy from and feel comfortable with people they like, but that, most often, this means people who are like them. And, in digital, those people are in extremely short supply.

I have a very good friend who told me what could be viewed as quite a depressing story.

After years of struggling in vain build a marketing business and consistently failing to have his ideas and work really taken seriously by clients he eventually turned 40, got fat and went a bit bald.

Guess what? Suddenly he’s worth listening to and can hardly stop winning business. He’s the voice of experience, a safe pair of hands, someone to trust.

So what can we do?

In an industry so desperately short on real commercial experience, it’s difficult to see how things can change quickly. Despite all logic and evidence to the contrary many clients still aren’t showing much sign of making the shift to digital as aggressively as they perhaps should be.

In short, they still aren’t taking it and us, seriously.

So, maybe it’s up to us to raise our game and figure out new and better ways to communicate. We need to start to look like the kinds of people that are likely to deliver results. Professional, dedicated, organised, and utterly trustworthy. The stakes get higher every day and digital simply has to find a way to finally come in from the cold and become part of the business mainstream.

But maybe some won’t relish the transition, choosing instead to continue to sulk and stomp about, bemoaning the fact that ‘no one understands us’ like the rebellious teenagers of the business world, all the while being secretly in love with our cool-kid, know it all status?

In the meantime I’m off to get myself a sharp new suit, a sensible haircut and maybe enrol myself on the next CIM or DMA professional qualification course I can lay my hands on while I’m at it.

Digital, it’s time to grow up.

“Should we have a Facebook page” or “who’s going to be interested in talking about X product online” would be fairly typical responses to any attempt to turn the conversation to such matters. Of course, some ‘cult’ status brands have made some inroads via this approach due to their ability to naturally galvanize consumers into self-assembling groups of slightly fanatical ‘advocates’. This was happening any way, it’s just that social platforms helped these people to connect with each other in simpler ways without geographic restriction therefore increasing momentum.

All of this somewhat misses the point to a certain extent.

If you’re looking for some pointers as to the true power of social media and a hint of how marketing, or rather, business will look in the coming years, you need to look no further than the recent, startling announcement by advertising giant Pepsi Co. that it would pull its entire $20M US Super bowl advertising budget and dump the lot into a huge social media campaign. Yes, you read that right, the whole $20M.

The campaign sees Pepsi giving away the entire sum to worthy causes – causes suggested by guess who? Yes, you, the public. The full details can be found here http://www.netimperative.com/news/2010/february/pepsi-ditches-super-bowl-tv-ads-for-20m-social

Now, that’s a pretty seismic event. In the world of advertising, few slots offer a larger captive audience than the US Super Bowl, meaning that 30 second ad slots go for up to $2M a time. This is an incredibly bold move by Pepsi – who I guess have deep enough pockets to give such a thing a try in the first place – and maybe there’s a certain shock factor to the whole thing which will help to propel this particular campaign forward, but, looking beyond the headline, it’s worth thinking about what’s actually happening here. Pepsi are effectively exploring different ways to create exposure and ‘brand equity’. Rather than spend the cash on flashy adverts in a slightly underhand attempt to subconsciously influence the masses in a single sitting (i.e. traditional advertising) they are in fact engaging people consciously on a one to one basis and – it has to be said – doing and awful lot of GOOD in the process.

Self-serving, admittedly, but the end result is the same. The money gets spent, people ‘benefit’ and therefore Pepsi gains kudos, masses of ‘free’ exposure and lots of those lovely warm fuzzy brand association-type feelings that all brands ultimately strive for.

So there we have it. Maybe we’ve just witnessed the birth of a whole new advertising model. Admittedly it’s one that’s been gestating for some time, but now it’s here, will things ever be quite the same again?

What if ALL advertisers decide to dump their budgets into building orphanages and healing the sick? Sadly I can’t see that happening any time soon, but maybe, just maybe we as consumers might start to favour brands who spend their budgets in a slightly more ethical and responsible manner than chopping down acres of rainforest and subsequently posting it in pulped and luridly printed form through our letterboxes against our will? I guess time will tell, but to me it feels like there’s something afoot here that isn’t going to go away quietly. Watch this space.

TOYOTA APOLOGY

As if all that wasn’t enough, last week supplied a second ‘fall of your chair’ social media moment when Jim Lentz, president of Toyota USA, appeared on the companies YouTube channel to apologize in person over the recent ‘sticking pedal’ recall debacle. You can see the whole thing for yourself here. http://www.youtube.com/user/ToyotaUSA#p/c/9FC450C0F2BFE90B/2/ZCb2dEFBq7I

Let’s sit back and examine what just happened here. Things are moving so fast in this space that there’s a real danger that we could all get a bit ‘yeah, so what’ about this. This is the PRESIDENT of a major international manufacturing company apologizing IN PUBLIC and IN PERSON for problems within the business and offering sincere assurances that the issues are being taken seriously and addressed.

Not only that, but the medium chosen to offer this apology? Not television, but YouTube, a social media platform. I don’t know about anyone else, but I think that’s an incredibly brave and forward thinking move by TOYOTA and presents the company as a very in-touch, human and caring organization. You’d be lucky to get a letter of apology from most CEOs – let alone a personal statement on YouTube and if there’s one thing that today’s consumers crave it’s power.

We want our voices to be heard. We want to know that ‘they’ are paying attention and that they are responding to our needs. The fastest (and possibly only) way for brands to build real equity in today’s marketplace is to enter into exactly this kind of two-way dialog with consumers. Treat us as equals, partners and respected individuals with opinions that matter and we will flock to you in droves. But disappoint or mislead us at your peril, for, thanks to social media, we now have the tools to tear down and destroy what took years of toil and effort to build, in the blink of an eye.

Oh and one final thing, don’t break our guitars, ok?

Or we might just tell 7,691,614 people. And counting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

Yesterday I was lucky enough to spend a day in the company of some of the nations leading retail movers-and-shakers at a special summit designed to focus the attention and hopefully shed some light upon the manifold, complex issues facing those brave enough to venture (or perhaps unfortunate enough to have been pushed) into the murky world of multi channel retailing.

I don’t envy them. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, many are realising that they have failed to keep their eye on the ball and are now struggling to catch up. Woolworths, Zavvi, Borders et al, as we all know, weren’t so lucky. Indeed, some would say there is a palpable undercurrent of anxiety in the room.

All of these people, I assume, were in attendance with a view to gaining insight and knowledge – of which there was an abundance on offer – but I suppose what’s really important with any of these events is what happens when the newly informed and motivated individuals arrive back in the ‘real world’ – armed with some new strategies and ideas and begin to grapple with the day to day issues of implementing such wide ranging and fundamental changes across the disparate and often badly integrated departments making up a typical ‘old school’ retail operation.

In the vast majority of cases what happens, at least in my experience, is not a great deal. Goodbye Borders. Goodbye Woolworths. Goodbye Zavvi. Who’s next?

This is why the ‘few who do’ are always in the minority. Having the right information (i.e. watching what’s happening) is very definitely not the whole solution. Action, often on a huge and undoubtedly daunting scale, is, at this late stage of the game, mostly what’s required.

Indeed, sitting in the crowd and listening to the ostensibly very positive, forward looking discussions taking place, my feelings were, I have to admit, ones of mild boredom verging on despondency. Admittedly the content of the individual presentations was on the whole excellent and in some cases exceptionally good. But once again it occurs to me that there is really nothing new being said here.

Am I suffering from déjà vu? Can this really be Jan 2010? Hasn’t everyone known all of this stuff for most of the last 10 years at least? Unfortunately, I have to say that I think the answer is that, yes, we’ve known it, but what has anyone done about it?

An example.

A question was asked about multi-variable testing. A show of hands was requested to indicate who had ‘heard of’ such a thing. The result? Three hands went ‘up’ out of an audience of maybe 100 people – two being mine and that of a colleague sitting a couple of rows in front.

Come on guys?

Multivariable and A/B testing have been cornerstones of any effective online optimisation strategy for literally donkey’s years – and I’d argue that, in 2010, anyone with the vaguest connection to multichannel retailing, however tangential, ought to give themselves a proper kick up the backside for not being aware of such a simple, powerful tool. Look it up. Its reasonably easy to do, and could (depending upon the size and level of optimisation of your existing online business) make you a couple of extra million in sales, almost overnight. No joke.  If you don’t believe me, give me a call in the office and we’ll come and explain how you could do something similar.

Let’s be honest about this. It’s not a lack of available information that has prevented retailers from delivering properly integrated, multi-channel offerings before now. Nor has there been a shortage of well-qualified potential partners, advisors and strategists available throughout this period to help such business successfully undertake the required transition, should they have felt compelled to do so.

To be perfectly frank, for those of us on the outside looking in, for the last 10 years it’s often felt like we were witnessing a wholesale, ostrich-like, head-in-the-sand denial of the fact that the issues even existed. And boy have we tried and tried and tried again (in some cases for the best part of a decade) to get the message across.

Which is what makes the likes of the demise of companies like Borders, Woolworth’s and Zavvi all the more depressing. I often wonder if those businesses had whole teams of agencies and potential partners practically knocking their doors off the hinges, just trying to communicate ideas and strategies that they just knew would help to make a difference?  What went wrong? Whatever happened, they failed to respond quickly enough and it cost them the business. And that probably didn’t have to happen.

I suppose in closing, the take home message from this event has to be that the time for ‘standing by and watching how this thing develops’ is definitely, definitively over. It’s now time to make something happen – or resign yourself to the ‘what the hell happened there’ gang. The pace of change is, if anything, accelerating and for some, maybe it could already be too late.

Personally I doubt if we’ve seen the last of the major high street disaster stories, but for those brave enough to step up and grasp the multichannel nettle firmly and with sufficient determination, the rewards will be enormous.