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Tuesday 18 October 2011

Well observed piece on the perils of online purchase journeys

Watch, cringe & then go back and check you are not losing sales opportunities by making your consumer's lives more difficult than needs to be with arduous online check-out processes.

Then remember to check it works on mobile operating systems - ASOS recently reported an 800% growth year on year of purchases via mobile .

Many thanks to my brighton buddies at Breeze Marketing for spotting and sharing the video!

Wednesday 5 October 2011

Imagining the future

What does the future of digital look like? It's a frequently asked question.

I spend a lot of time trying to explain to clients and colleagues who ask my opinion this that there is no such think as "the long term" in digital because there is no ceteris paribus, everything is changing all the time, faster than we can imagine. 

I think the better question is one of what needs (current or potential) do we think digital can be applied to to solve, or assist with, and what roles do our brands have to play within that scenario.  I like the fact that Pepsi are trying push their ability to grab first player advantage by investing in start-up ideas via their Pepsi10 programme. Not what you necessarily expect from a mainstream FMCG player. Others would do well to have such vision.

But back to predicting the future, that requires human insight, inspiration and imagination as well as technical capability, an idea expressed really neatly in this video from Visual Futurist Syd Mead . A must watch.



If that whets your appetite and you have some time to kill then this presentation on the digital heart is one of the best decks I've read in quite some time:


THE DIGITAL HEART.
View more presentations from MediaFront

Acute observations..

Via a friend's Facebook newsfeed this morning...

A click too far

I've come across several examples this week (already) of brands annoying me by putting up barriers to my engagement or participation with them. Frustrating. My original click may have been generated by work related curiosity, but ultimately it's my consumer hat that gets annoyed, so just think how bad it would be if I was a genuine consumer with consumer motivations. Working in the digital space means I have some awareness of the technical considerations that make for certain scenarios or brand imposed must-haves, but to Joe Bloggs consumer it's likely to leave you perplexed and frustrated.

So boo hiss to Eurostar on Facebook, I can't tell you what their Trainstorming initiative is about 'cos I couldn't be bothered to allow and then have to re-instate secure browsing to see it.

Why should I turn off secure browsing? That doesn't fill me with confidence

Shame too to Google/YouTube - I've been playing around with Livestreams as an opportunity this week, but was a little affronted to find that despite being logged in (notice top right), it wanted me to log in (again) to ask a question.

When I clicked, I noted that they  kindly(!?) offered to let Google manage my YouTube account.  Now clearly having clicked "I agree" to T&C's originally there's some degree of that inherent by my use of their platform but still....

I continue to see far too many participation ideas that really haven't understand the value exchange properly and want me to jump through (often unspecified) hoops to get something in return (often not clearly specified either), all of which makes for a lot of abandoned clickstreams.

Think people, think!

In a busy world I need to be reasonably sure that there's a fair trade off for my time and effort or I just won't bother at all.