Charles Dunstone Speech

I went along to see Charles Dunstone speak to the Entrepreneurs group at the London School of Economics on February 27. I have tried to type up the session as best I can from the recording I made at the event.

Thank you very much indeed for that very kind introduction.

I think that I want to start off really by saying two things. I am not sure that I am an entrepreneur, to my mind an entrepreneur is someone who keeps starting new businesses; a kind of restless soul who keeps doing new things and to be honest I've only ever done one thing. I started Carphone Warehouse and I stuck with it so I was lucky to find it and I haven't had the inspiration to start something new.

I 'll give you my view of the world; the view of someone who has started just one business and how we managed to make that work. And I think that the second thing is (and I am going to preface this by saying what we aspire to be like, not what we are like all the time.)

As an organisation we make absolutely horrendous and ridiculous mistakes constantly all of the time its extremely frustrating process running a business and I think that there are 14 and a half thousand people in our business.

Sometimes you look at them all and its actually a miracle if you look at all of them and all the relationships the way that we all interact that anything works at all. But we do our best and we have systems together.

The story of the business is I suppose one of them business folk stories in that I left school had a place at university and got cold feet after a year out. I felt I wasn't cut out for doing more academic work, I just wanted to get on and do something. I went to work for NEC which was a big producer in those days, number one or number two in the market for making mobile phones.

I actually started in the computer business and then got transferred to mobile phones. And it was the most amazing world to move into. We're talking about it a bit ahead of time; I look at most of the people here I guess you can't ever image a world that didn't have mobile phones.

But in those days as the name of Carphone Warehouse suggests we sold things that were actually fitted in your car, that would not come out of you car. You drove around with the thing in it, that was it. When you got out of the car and switched off, when you switched the ignition off, you couldn't use it again until you got back inside the car. I know that sounds extraordinary now but in those days people thought it was pretty cool.

And we used to out with these things and these were 500 - 600GBP in 1989, that would be 1,000 GBP in today's money maybe even more. And then portable phones started coming.

So I could see this thing, I'd been in the computer business; it seemed really simple - you could explain to a customer what a mobile phone did in about five seconds. They got it, they wanted it, they liked it and it changed people's lives.

And probably the only real entrepreneurial insight I had was sitting in NEC I saw that most of the people I was selling to were targeting big companies to sell them to. These guys were targeting the BBC and Xerox and all these kinds of people that they imagined had big fleets of engineers and sales reps on the road and could get amazing productivity through having mobile phones. But I could see and you could watch what was happening in the world, the people who it transformed their lives it was not big businesses but small business and the self-employed because if you were a builder you could get work whilst you were at work by mobile phone.

Before that, and again no one will hear will remember this if you wanted to get a builder to come and do some work on your house you had to leave a message on their answer machine at home and when they got home they would ring you back to arrange to do the work and book an appointment.

So this was a transformation for people who ran small businesses. The idea of Carphone Warehouse was to say we should let the people, these self employed people the same chance to get a mobile phone, to get advice and service as someone at BP or Shell or some other enormous organisation.

So I left NEC in 1989, started the business in an apartment building at the top of Harley Street called Harley House. I had a friend of mine who was a music publisher and he had on half of the flat and we had the other half of the flat and we advertised in the Evening Standard, on Capital Radio; those kind of things.

People would call up, we'd book an appointment and we'd send one of our engineers out and they'd put the phone in at the customers premises home or office and they'd go and install it in their car.

We moved in by May and by October the landlord evicted us as we were clearly carrying out a business in a residential apartment and there's one thing being a music publisher as they just take themselves up and down the lift and we were filling the lift up with phones and trucks were turning up and we were making a nuisance of ourselves.

So we very quickly got kicked out and we went to a shop in the Marylebone Road near Baker Street where we still have a store there today. When we first got there we could afford to rent it, but it was a wreck it had been a hearing-aid shop before and it was all boarded up and we had no money to do it up, so we lived behind the barricades for another six months selling over the phone as we had in the flat but making enough money so that by October we opened our first ever store.

At the time people thought that it was insane to sell mobile phones through shops, people bought them through newspaper ads, engineers visited your house it was an expensive product.

And from those very humble beginnings we added another store and another store and the thing kept the momentum. The market grew at an explosive rate and new networks and new handset manufacturers came out and we had the most amazing ride for the next ten years. I had no inspiration at the beginning that this was going to be a revolution,

I think that the mobile phone is the fastest-growing, selling consumer good in the UK or product in the UK. I had no idea about that. I just left NEC, I was trying to make a living and bought some phones. I think the reason that we did better than some of our competitors and the main reason that we managed to keep on growing it, and it still resides in the company today but its hard to keep the flame burning is that when you've got a business where you absolutely start with nothing, we were in a derelict shop surrounded by insulated rooms where people used to do hearing aid rooms prescriptions for people.

And you were sat in there, we had nothing, we had no experience, we had no money, no brand just enthusiasm really. All we knew was that we had to do more for the customer to win their business than anybody else would. And that's all we actually had was our passion and our enthusiasm and that's all we had to stop you going to some much bigger company.

And its hard to keep that going, and at the heart of the company that still beats and there's a sense that we're not owed a living. And I wasn't aware of it at the time but we actually created a role for ourselves that didn't actually exist.

Who is to say that they needed a middle man between a customer and the mobile phone network, why couldn't they have sold directly to the customer? But somehow we sort of inserted ourselves in there with customers, we worked hard with the customers and they came back and told their friends. And ultimately you get a bit of momentum going and then suddenly you reach a point were it becomes more difficult for the networks and the handset manufacturers to ignore you. Till you get to the stage now where we'll connect more mobile phones than any mobile phone network in the UK.

So we're bigger on a monthly sale basis than many of our suppliers. Its kind of like you reach a point in the same that Tescos reach with Procter & Gamble or Unilever with some products, where actually if you want sell a product be it a detergent or food product in the UK if you don't have Tescos your missing such a large part of the marketplace that you can't succeed without them.

And our very original plan all the way through was to say we have to get ourselves in a position to say the only way to future-proof ourselves that whoever comes into the marketplace, whatever they sell they only way to launch it is in our stores.

So I guess the lessons that I take out of that are two-fold really that I'd pass on to anyone else. You've got to work harder for people's business than anybody else will and you've got to think about ways to deliver that. And secondly you've got to get yourself a certain amount of scale in the marketplace to ensure that people can't ignore and can't disintermediate you out of the process. And those are the two very critical things I would bet that right now if you went to talk to the various CEOs of the various mobile phone networks, they'd really rather that Carphone Warehouse hadn't got as big as it had got.

It would have made his life a great deal easier if we hadn't had done that and we've done that and it has become more powerful because its kind of through customer power. Which is that if customers keep choosing you and customers keep choosing Tescos or Walmart or whoever it may be, then the suppliers can't ignore the influence that you have in the marketplace.

I spend my life thinking about what do I need to do to make what we do better than what anybody else does and give us an advantage and what do I need do I need to do to ensure that no one can come and take our place that there is no new Carphone Warehouse that wants the business more, that is going to get up earlier, that is going to work harder than we do. And that keeps me awake at night. I think that one of the guys who founded Intel, a guy called Andy Grove coined the expression Only the Paranoid Survive and that's a kind of chilling thought, but I think that in business today the world is changing and you have to be pretty paranoid.

Customer are changing fast, habits are changing very fast and if you don't adapt to that someone will turn up and start eating your lunch. You have to stay extremely alert.

Carphone Warehouse grew up at a time was quite interesting, it was a time that was kind of post-Thatcher were consumers had started to become much more demanding about what they bought and kind of had an idea that their choice was much more powerful that knew this when they bought. There was a sense that people are turning against large institutions they don't like whether its the government, the police, Marks & Spencers or the big kind of established institutions are sort of under attack from people. People have been traveling more, they're exposed to more advertising, there is much more competition around within the marketplace and as such if you started a new business and you started a new brand and you looked like you were trying harder people were much more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt 15 or 20 years before that time.

In fact, the process has continued and continued to grow even since I started the business in '89 and it is much easier to start a new business now than it would have been 25 - 30 years ago when it would have been massive barriers to entry.

At the same time and I guess these guys feel like household names now that they've been around but when Carphone Warehouse was getting going, Pret a Manger was getting going, Dyson was just building his vacuum cleaners, Virgin Atlantic had been around for a while, Starbucks was teaching us how to pay 20 times more for a cup of coffee than we'd ever done before. Freeserve, Freeserve has been and gone now, but Freeserve was teaching people that they didn't need to pay to get on the internet. Direct Line was showing that you could buy insurance directly rather than through a broker. Amazon came along sometime afterwards changed the way that people bought books and music.

And people like Nokia changed themselves from producing rubber tyres and wellington boots; selling goods to Russia. They had an extraordinary moment sometime in the 80s after the collapse of the Soviet Union they decided to abandon their old heavy industry stuff, they bought a business that made mobile phones and the rest is history. They became the biggest mobile phone company in the world, I think that at their peak 70 per cent of the entire value of the Finnish stock exchange was represented by Nokia shares.

But if you think all of those companies came into marketplaces where there were established players: people bought their sandwiches from Marks & Spencers, they flew with British Airways, people bought their vacuum cleaners from Hoover etc.

And all of these guys came into the marketplace were the barriers of entry had come down a bit as I said, what they actually did is sit down and said how do people actually use the products that we sell, how do they buy them and how can we make the experience better.

And they went into a marketplace looking at it from the customers point of view, not looking at it from a suppliers point of view; in the way that many many people do I kind of always sum this up and I try to get our business to think about it is that they actually sold things to people in a way that they wanted to buy them.

And were we've made mistakes its too often where we've made our lives more convenient, but its often not in the best interest of the customer. That's when it all starts going wrong and thats when the wheels start coming off. I don't know who said it but another great quote is that people get the competition that they deserve.

And in a funny way the British Airways and Air France's deserve easyJet and Ryan Air as they charge the premium for a product that people didn't really value and services they didn'tt really want to pay for. These guys turned around and said what do they really want, whats the minimum I can deliver on price that will absolutely blow their minds away.

First Direct gave the clearing banks the competition they deserved and you can argue they still do.

When I look at some of the big old-fashioned businesses and some of those who supply us they're walking backwards into the future. Their walking into a future, but their walking into a future looking at what they've got today and they're trying to protect it instead of turning around and looking at where am I going and what do I take. And if you try and keep everyone off your bit of grass you're going to end up tripping up and there's a lot of people looking forward taking the ground away from you, so the other thing of only the paranoid survive is kind of eat your children before someone else does. You can't have sacred cows within your business that you say I can't do this, I need to protect this.

We do a very weird thing and I have a lot of trouble explaining this to our investors: we have a rule within our business that we mustn't increase our margins. We don't want to make more money on the products that we sell tomorrow than we do today. Every time we can get an improvement in terms of the price that we pay, we'll pass it on to the customers, we'll try to turn it into volume and create more of a scorched earth and it makes it more difficult for anybody else to compete with use as we'll get such scale. And this world, scale and market share is everything; where your dealing with big suppliers and trying to get competitive advantage against people who are selling very similar products. We go as far as to describe it as the Tyranny of Margins.

At the moment we must be BT's worst nightmare.

The person who is your worst nightmare is the person who isn't in your business today, when we started TalkTalk we didn't make any money out of fixed-line telephony; so any money we made was better than the money we made already. If we made a pound out of it, its a pound more than we had yesterday. Its a nightmare because BT has a business that makes a billion GBP per year and they've got these lunatics running around ruining all the economics of the marketplace, acting in what must seem to them in a manic crazy manner.

Their problem is and their decision has always been as its part of their DNA - What we'll try and do, is we'll try and confuse the marketplace, but we wont reduce prices to our customers because to reduce the prices that would make it impossible for TalkTalk to compete with us we'd drop them by like a third and that would just cut our business from a billion GBP to 600 million. We just can't afford to do that. Were losing some customers every year to TalkTalk will lose us less money. The problem with that is its like someone's cut one of your arteries and the blood is just dripping away, it won't kill you today but the blood just keeps pouring out.

Ulitmately you'll find you're nowhere. Our biggest thing is try never to get trapped by margin a way that you couldn't compete with a new player and keep turning your buying power into being even more competitive against people and make it much harder for people to get into your business and take your share. That is one of the most critical things to do.

You might imagine my investors think that's an odd thing and as we get more powerful we can't increase our margins: I keep telling them and I suspect they'll keep not understanding but we'll keep trying to do that.

I think also the thing that I really notice changes as you get bigger and I try and fight against is that big organisations are comfortable.

Its the end of February tomorrow and you know what, everyone is going to get paid at Carphone Warehouse and there is no doubt that this is going to happen. But anyway, our company was best when we didn't know if we could pay ourselves at the end of the month or not as that gave a real energy a real spirit, if you didn't make it happen maybe the company was going to go bust and we couldn't all pay ourselves. Today everyone is going to get paid, we were going to launch this at the beginning of April but its all a bit difficult so we'll delay it by another four weeks. And in big organisations decisions don't get made, things get left because its more comfortable to do nothing.

So I spend my life as the organisation gets bigger trying to be more-and-more unreasonable and making it an uncomfortable place to sit in. It sounds a terrible thing to do, but otherwise I'm terrified that we'll get as many of my suppliers are: lazy, sloppy, bureaucratic. People that deal with us may say that we are that already.

And I look at some of those and they just can't get out of their own way, the whole thing is so focused internally. The other thing is if your driver or entrepreneur to keep your passion, keep your drive and keep setting the organisation unreasonable goals otherwise it will never stretch itself and someone smaller neater, nimbler, more hungry, more aggressive will turn up and start taking over. It comes back to this thing about keep on just being paranoid about what we do. I think of the things I find most difficult: we have an amazingly strong culture within the business, you know we have grown enormously I don't really know how that happened.

What we did to create the culture is we did more tomorrow of what we did today and we kept growing but ultimately we kept working at it and its all worked out ok.

That means as you get biggers its actually quite difficult for me to say I really need to focus on that as that was a key thing that made the business, I am not entirely sure what it was that did make the business, so I just keep on trying to live by my instincts, impart my passion in the organisation and also two things most of the stuff that happens in business is common sense not amazing inspiration: particularly if you work in a retail business as everyone of us is an expert in a retail business as everyone of us is a shopper.

You know what its like to go in a great shop: you know what its like to go in WH Smith and you know what its like to go to Pret a Manger and you can see the difference in the two organisations just by walking into through the door. All of us have that experience and all of use can say I want to run a business like that one.

I go to work and try not to be like WH Smith or Boots or whoever it maybe.

And also its actually just about execution and effort, its not one amazing thing you can do, there's not ten amazing things, its a million. Its tough and its demoralising, its like them people that spin plates I spend all my time getting more plates spinning and I run round faster trying to keep more plates spinning and when you least it expect people will start hurling rocks at you and making life difficult.

After all that I love it, I love working as a team, my best time of year in the business is the run up to Christmas, earlier in the year everyone is travelling around the place dealing with suppliers, by the end of November we've bought it all, we've got the stock, we've booked the advertising. If we've got it wrong there's nothing we can do about it, the die is set, plans are made.

Actually there's a great sense then because everyone is back in the business and all anybody is focused on and caring about is the execution of the plan. We're like the team in Marylebone Road just bigger, everyone is focused on the customer, on the sales results and it feels a bit like the old days.

I'd just like to end with a quote I read a while ago from Roger Bannister after having done the four-minute mile "Its the ability to take more out of yourself than you've got'. When I was 25 I had no confidence that I've managed to grow this business, somehow along the way I've figured it out. And the thing that gives me the most confidence is the people I meet at all levels of government and business, they're just human, there's a lot of fallibility out there. Its absolutely possible for anybody out there to build a business that they have the drive and passion to do.

Dangerous Minds

Over at Edge.org, they ask some 110 scientists and other thinkers a new question each year and collate the answers.

This year the question was What is your dangerous idea?

There was the usual cyber punk / Terminator SkyNet stuff about the internet becoming self aware and science becoming a new religion or that the age of reason may hit a brick wall.

I found that one of the posts by MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle about the decline of authenticity that I read at random, thought-provoking as it meant that much we look for in good public relations practice: credible, believable and authenticity will no longer be valued.

The lines will be blurred and the ethics of the PR profession will be challenged by this new world view.

Warwick encourages students to blog

The University of Warwick has managed to get its students to create over 4,000 via its own site for them.

As well as providing valuable publicity for the university, allowing the university a way of getting an understanding the student body zeitgest, provides valuable grist for virtual social anthropoligists like Sense Worldwide, it allows prospective scholars to be Scobleized by current students ;-).

Any initative that helps reduce the communications generational gap currently opening up between prospective marketers and their younger future audience is very welcome.

Kudos to Drew at The Blog Consultancy.

Dutch drink blog kool-aid

Thanks to Dooce, I found out that the Nederlands Bureau voor Toerisme & Congressen offered bloggers a round trip to Amsterdam, accomodation in a couple of business-class hotels and 72 hours of free public transport and reduced cost access to museums and tourist attractions via the i amsterdam smart card scheme.

Its probably going to work better than pandering to the usual suspects in travel journalism who are spoilt with warmer locations or fresh white powder snow this time of year.
More details on the programme here.

Around the Web

Famous former Apple employee Guy Kawasaki has a couple of great blog entries that are great use for PR professionals.

• His guide to composing emails is invaluable to PRs emailing journalists and clients
• Guy's guide to the art of schmoozing codifies common sense into probably one of the most difficult arts of the PR professional

Presentation Zen collates and provides great advice on presentation from that the Keynote deck to media interviews.

PatternHunter outlines what they've called Jobs' Law based on an informed observation posted on Slashdot.org.

He really is personally involved in the 5% of the most important decisions at Apple at any given time. That amounts to tremendous personal attention to the details of what is going on - and it also sets the tone for the other 95% of the decisions that get made when he isn't around.

Rogue IT

I was surprised when I was reading an article on Rogue IT Rogue IT may be a blessing in disguise by David L Margulius in InfoWorld. The main thrust of the article is that user implemented innovations may have value in themselves. Duh!

PCs were not shipped into companies during the late 1970s and early 1980s by innovative, far-sighted IT staff.

On the contrary, VisiCalc and the Apple II were smuggled in by middle managers to make their own lives easier and paid for out of their own personal monies or expensed back to the company.

This has continued on with web applications, PDAs, personal cell phones and pagers and wireless email.

Now web services by the likes 37 Signals to free software like browser toolbars and RSS newsreaders to iTunes provide users with easy-to-use, easy-to-implement solutions to everyday problems.

What is even scarier is the 'expert' opinion GartnerGroup How to Eliminate Five Causes of Poor IT Financial Visibility (September 14, 2005 - expensive registration required) which contains advice to IT departments on trying to repress independent thought within the organisation.

PSP Print ads

PSP Print ads
Originally uploaded by renaissancechambara.

I like these new single sheet ads on the London Underground for the Sony PSP.

The designers deliberate use of white space must have taken quite some convincing of the marketing manager to sign off.

Also the poster shows that an effective poster can be done in just one colour.

Shame the PSP looks like a polished black tombstone and the UMD media standard has a failure thus far.

There are murmurings that Sony is going to try and breathe life into UMD by selling Sony Pictures films in a dual DVD / UMD package.

However UMD is likely to become a victim of the video iPod in the same way that iPod MP3 players strangled Mini-Disc.

The Week

Work has been busy, but Danny Rampling's farewell compilation album has been keeping me company.

Leaving work and getting along very late to the These4Walls social allowed me to catch up with some people that I hadn't seen in a good while and one person that I knew but had never met.

I have spoken on-and-off with Edmund Kellman of PR Newswire on and off for the past six years or more but never had the chance to meet with him until this week.

Friday saw Hannah Marriott of PR Week call for input into a blogging feature that PR Week will be running, we'll see if I get coverage under my work persona.

PopBitch PR lessons

Gossip email newsletter Popbitch has some useful info for those PRs whose clients want radio coverage on Heart FM:

In the age of the robotic, media trained pop star, its nice to hear that some celebrities still retain some personality. Will Young went to Heart FM to promote his last single. Will started to recount a story to the DJ, but halfway through was interrupted by the jock needing to introduce a sponsored slot....

"Sorry Will, hold that thought and we'll be right back after this commercial break" etc... Young took huge offence at this rudeness and just got up and walked out of the studio.

Since then, Heart have banned all live guests and now pre-record everything 'as live'.

Will's loss is some clients gain as it looks like there is a great opportunity to provide more controlled or 'canned' content to Heart FM.

Sharp threads

The pranksters over at Social Pest have come up with a great new t-shirt design.

The art work has been done by Jeremy Madl a well-known art toy designer, comes in a limited production run of 100 shirts AND is made of 55 per cent hemp, 45 per cent cotton to appeal to both stoner and green market demographics.

Every loser wins

There was an interesting article over at TelecomTV about how Motorola is happy to leave the bleeding-edge pain to someone else and is instead taking a more user-centric approach.

"Do I really want to launch a WCDMA phone with a Qualcomm chip that drives up my bill of materials by $40, but which I can't sell for a higher price, and give up my profit margin?" asked the head of Motorola's handset division.

There was a relentless logic to it. What companies tend to forget is that consumers don't care how their call is delivered they just want it to work, the user experience has to be as good they've had previously plus a reason to change.

The only thing that concerned me was the way Garriques sat on his laurels with regards the RAZR rather like former Palm CEO Carl Yankowski sat on the laurels of Palm V during a European media tour in June 2000, right before Microsoft came in to steal their lunch.

Roll up, Roll up

I read an interesting posting over at alarm:clock about Web Roll-Up. This is where a company aggregates a whole pile of web 2.0 gizmos.

Marc Canter, the founder of Macromedia is a big fan of the 'digital lifestyle aggregator' concept because Web 2.0 companies are often considered just single features to be bought by someone else.

So the theory goes that aggregating these services together provides the customer with a burning desire to visit your site instead.

This reminds me of of a how the pitch for a web portal must have gone a decade ago, has Canter et al dusted down some old PowerPoint decks and sprinkled them with XML web services goodness?

Web 2.0 are a reaction to three things:

• Bloatware such as Microsoft Office. There is a sweet spot between functionality and usability, by focusing on doing one thing well applications like Backpack are trying to address this market
• Using open APIs still provides the connected benefit of integrated applications if its needed (like the ability to write this blog in Flickr and post both blog and display a picture from my Flickr album here)
• Using the power of collaboration to 'empower' the consumer. Businesses already realise how valuable it is , its the reason why IT directors go all moist at the thought of how many concurrent seats an Oracle application can support or the benefits that groupware like Lotus Notes can supply whilst still frustrating users

I can't see the benefit that a web roll-up would provide. Whilst portals are good providers of news, dedicated new media sites have managed to thrive amongst them.

Power to the people

One of the key limiting features in the technology sector is battery performance.

Processors, memory chips, storage media and new screen technologies have all come down in cost with time and improvements in process technologies so that we are paying less money for IT gadgets on an ongoing basis.

Where the model falls down is battery technology which has not been improving at anything like the same rate.

It's the achilles heel of the iPod, laptops and my portable DVD player. Some Japanese companies (notably Panasonic, Toshiba and NEC) have looked at using fuel cells instead.

Real Business 50 to watch (February 2006 page 38) had a nice vanity paragraph for Oxis Energy who make big claims for their lithium sulphide (sulfide for all you American chemists) technology versus lithium-ion and nickel-cadmium with up to five times the power and a 40 per cent cost saving.

Ultralife whose customers include the US military use lithium-sulphur (sulfur) dioxide technology is a key competitor in this sector and rival technologies utilise manganese dioxide instead of sulphur.

I ran a quick search on science search engine Scirus and found some 500 abstracts and articles on the area of lithium-sulphur battery technology. It looks like things could get interesting in this sector.

Picture courtesy of Energizer.com: the Energizer bunny and name are trademarks of Energizer.

New Media Finds

I came across Valleywag.com, a kind of Defamer for Silicon Valley, it makes for the most compelling reading about the valley since Robert X. Cringely's Accidential Empires.

There was gossip on company execs that had not made it over this side of the pond and adds a bit of life to the droll Notes from the Field column in InfoWorld (written a Robert X Cringely, but not the Robert X Cringely) and the mangy attempt at gossip by Spencer F. Katt of eWeek - note to the editor, the feline puns aren't funny any more give them up - you couldn't get a gig at a Salvation Army hostel let alone Vegas with them.

Doing for the vulture capitalist community what belle de jour did for prostitution Sandhill Slave is a blog that provides an insight into the daily grind of trashing Joe Six-Packs savings and pension fund.

BMW have some free audio books available here, following on from their series of short films that used cinematic art to pimp their cars BMW have teamed up with Random House.

The audio books feature a BMW as a main character obviously.

Kudos to Treonauts for flagging up the BMW audio books and SiliconValleyWatcher for the heads up on Sandhill Slave.

Events around London for your Calendar

The second SCT (second chance Tuesday) will be on March 28, venue to be confirmed.

Get to hear Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse courtesy of the London School of Economics on February 27, to get an invite email Jenny.

PR and media networking group These4Walls finally have another live networking event. The group founded by James Gordon Mackintosh and Adrian Chitty had remained dormant for a long time, venue to be confirmed but keep February 23 clear in yor diary.

Charlie Gower and the Sense posse are hosting another of their Cinchmark screenings: Timecode at the Sense Loft on February 22.

Kudos to the Soflow Network for the LSE information.

On heavy rotation: Where's the music?

Turntable
Originally uploaded by renaissancechambara.

I haven't bought new music for a good while. Dance music is seasonal in the run up to Christmas and until the Miami winter music conference and Ultra festival there is a dearth of good material.

I still kick the tyres of new records at Phonica but to be honest there isn't much there to interest me at the moment.

The business picks up steam once labels have had a chance to licence a few successes and then they become adventurous in taking risks with new tracks.

There is a surge in the run up to to the start of the season in Ibiza which is usually on the first Saturday in June, a lull during the summer when everyone is away and then full steam ahead to November when things go quiet again.

January and February are generally the best times to buy old records to fill out your collection as secondhand shops will be full of stock and have a lack of punters.

These shops rely on turnover to keep them going, so don't feel afraid of taking advantage. I have a consignment of three dozen records coming from a Norfolk-based record shop that I have picked up at 2GBP each rather than the 5 - 10GBP the records would have fetched at other times of the year.

Bubblicious

Some of the more evangelical talk around blogs has them shaking the world of media apart. I found blogs an interesting way of communicating and making personal publishing easier than ever.

I felt over time that blogging would affect companies reputations because of search engine rankings and would occasionally drive the news agenda.

To use two examples:

• Some of the most consistent search engine traffic that comes to this blog is for people looking for information about Sinn watches because of this blog posting here
• The second example is the result of a posting I wrote about Steve Ballmer's Stolen stolen stolen which received pick up from The Register, and Wired News Cult of Mac column
  

However there is a limited opportunity to create a media empire from it:

• Some early adopters like Gawker Media have managed to become successful
• Most media companies have adapted their online presence to include blogging as it is a cheap, effective content management and publishing system (when you consider that people like the Financial Times spent tens of millions of pounds to get online)
• Daniel Gross has a great article Twilight of the Blogs over at Slate talking about how Blogs have bubbled over, read it back-to-back with my contribution from a few years ago to FastCompany magazine online regarding the original new economy

In the same way that the net stratified out into having its own media establishment, so blogging has allowed a few people to join them. I've said before that the goldrush to corporate blogging reminded me of a similar rush a number of years ago on corporate webcasts and online press rooms. I am inclined to think that the business opportunity for high priced consultancy in these areas has passed.

Bottom line, am I likely to subscribe to an RSS feed of a blog allegedly written by the CEO of General Motors? No more than I wanted to watch their first webcast six years ago, unless I was an analyst or journalist looking at the automotive sector.

Blogging has joined the PR toolbox along with media alerts, press releases, webcasts and white papers; the difference is that the audience has to go and demand the content by clicking on a web link or subscribing to a feed in order to get it rather than receiving an email or snail mail package. In the same way that Daniel Gross talks about blogging firms selling out at the top of the market or taking venture capital funds for everything that they can get you can see a similar pattern in agency blogging:

• Rubel's move to Edelman has allowed him to 'sell out' at the top of the market and fair play to him
• Edelman's marketing efforts for this year will focus around podcasts, with Richard's new offering on the Edelman home page. Podcasts work better for agencies because they require a bit more prowess than the ability to use a web browser and have basic literacy skills. Not that many people have a good 'radio' presence to carry it off well. On the downside they require a bit more effort and time from a consumer PoV so I am unlikely to be podcasting any time soon
  
• Its a matter of routine now in my company and our competitors to put out non-game changing news purely as a blog post

Four Things

Drew B has linked to me in a blogtastic game of tick called four things. In this people who have been linked to name a number of different items in groups of four and then link to four other blogs that they know of that could continue this one.

In typical Wired reader style, this concept of an idea that can be communicated is called a meme (and memes are often written about in digerati circles).

Classic memes that non-geeks would have heard of include the Frankie Says series of t-shirts and No, but Yeah, but No dialogue from Little Britain.

Why four?

Three or six are the perfect numbers according to a discussion between Lee van Cleef and Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Wikipedia couldn't shed any light on it either.

Four jobs I've had

PR operative - at present
Foreman - heading up a shift team on the bitumen plant in the UK's second smallest oil refinery
DJ - up north, before the young people started getting back into guitars, freebase cocaine and heroin
On the line - in a meat packing plant

Four movies I can watch over and over

All the Presidents Men

The Dollars Trilogy (particularly For a Few Dollars More)

The Usual Suspects

Silmido

Four TV shows I love to watch

I don't have a television but I do have a soft spot for vintage shows, here's four that came to mind:

• Callan
• The Phil Silvers Show
  
• I love Lucy
• McCloud

Four places I've visited on holiday

• Dublin
• Leiden
  
• Ibiza
• Paris

Four favourite dishes

• As my mate Griff would say 'a big bowl of fuck-off' (a ramen noodle dish from Wagamamas)
• A decent Irish fried breakfrast with proper black and white pudding and a side serving of soda bread
• Rhubarb crumble
• A well done tuna steak
  

Four places I've lived

• Liverpool
• Galway
• London
• Huddersfield

Four sites I visit daily

It would actually be a hell of a lot more than this but: Slate.com, Wired.com, RTE.ie and ThinkSecret.com

Four places I'd rather be

Liverpool, with my mates, record shopping, sat in front of a range enjoying a turf fire

Four people I'm tagging

Ian Wood, Rainier PR, Tom Coates and Simon Willison

Assault on the senses

Part of the benefit of the web is that allows you access to more information than you could possibly process.

PointCast push software was to information what loft apartments were to New York real estate. It flaunted its riches of information in a constantly moving colour display that was enough to turn your average epilepsy sufferer into a world-champion break dancer.

Push technology died and was then resurrected in budget form as RSS feeds and channels for podcasting.

However Coolhunting.com came up with a couple of sites that capture PointCast's fountain of information feel.

News map represents stories based on their importance and how they relate to each other in a chaotic mess that works. It has the same colour for a particular category and represents the amount of media coverage for a story by the size of the text.

Whatsup looks like the kind of dynamic stylised map that would be more at home on the big screen in a Bond villain's living room and maps stories to geography.

Usability be damned its cool as.

The Wages of Spin

The Economist Online has an article talking about the rise of PR agencies Do we have a story for you! (January 19, 2005). The centrepiece of the article is an internal analysis conducted by Procter and Gamble that provided an indicator of how much marketing value PR provides in comparison to other disciplines. I first heard about this from Richard Edelman's blog in December (you can see the blog posting here).

The Hype

In a recent internal study, P&G concluded that the return was often better from a PR campaign than from traditional forms of advertising, according to Hans Bender, the firm's manager of external relations. One reason is that in comparison with many other types of marketing, PR is cheap. In P&G's case, it can represent as little as 1% of a brand's marketing budget. That proportion could now rise, says Mr Bender, although he hastens to add that other forms of advertising and marketing would remain important for the company.

P&G drew the most interest in PR circles with these claims because having an effective apples for pears measurement tool-box is something that the industry has striven for over the past decade with only a modicum of success. This study looked at the launch of six different products, the return was better in four cases. There is a lot of qualifying statements in the article quote.

In addition critics such as Tom Formeski argue (try here and the comments here) that the return on investment for smaller brands is not so impressive. And to build a big brand, a healthy dose of conventional marketing communications helps enormously.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid

Dorothy Crenshaw, president of Stanton Crenshaw, an independent PR firm based in New York, says that many of her colleagues are suffering from 'consultant envy',but that PR remains a very inexact science. There are also limits to the miracles it can be expected to achieve. She claims to have turned down a $1m commission from a client desperate to boost his business-to-business website in the midst of the dotcom boom because he had nothing much to tell the world. Sometimes a PR firm can indeed shape or create a buzz about a product, but not always. For PR to work, she says, "you have to have a legitimate story."

Interesting numbers

• Spending on PR in America reached some $3.7 billion in 2005 (source: Veronis Suhler Stevenson)
• Forecast growth in PR spend 9% a year (source: Veronis Suhler Stevenson)
• Forcecast for the overall US market for advertising and marketing, now worth a colossal $475 billion and growing at 6.7% a year

This growth rate is still below the magic 10 per cent that venture capitalists would look for in a business.

The UK

• The PR industry there employs 48,000 people (source: Centre for Economics and Business Research)
• 80% were working 'in-house', for companies or other organisations
• Just over half of Britain's in-house PRs work for the public sector, health organisations and charities.
• These organisations are also the biggest users of PR consultancies

On traditional PR

"Companies can try to serve up a tight, straight message through the media by issuing a one-way press release, but that's as flawed right now as a 15 or 30-second TV ad," says Pam Talbot, Edelman's chief in America.

Which is why agencies and inhouse PR staff are looking to expand into website design and participation media including blogging, leaving comments on other people's blogs, pod casts etc. In the longer-term this subversion of participation media may kill the goose that is laying the golden eggs in the same way that the advertising industry is now struggling to get cut through.

Media covering the following sectors are most dependent on PR

• Electronics
• Fashion
• Travel
• Beauty
• Food
• Celebrity / entertainment

The article didn't cover issues like the power of direct communication with consumers through search engine advertising (while this won't build your brand, it is extremely measurable). Increasingly I am asked not how would my programmes deliver against TV or print advertising but against search engine marketing.

Also the power of search engines as the measure of reputation was not covered (it doesn't matter if you have a great CSR programme in place and your CEO had a profile piece in the FT if the first ten hits on Google say that your company blows).

PR is a useful part of the marketing communications mix and can help you reach your audience through a multi-channel approach, however it is not a silver bullet to broader business issues like a product or service that is a dog or to build a brand on a shoe-string.

Kudos to Steve Rubel of the Micropersuasion blog.

The network effect of content

Tom Coates held a brief roundtable with some colleagues talking about some of his thoughts around what has been labelled Web 2.0, following on from the Future of Web Apps summit held by Carson Workshops last week.

The most interesting aspect I found was the recursive nature of some of the principles that he talked about with those that govern the underlying infrastructure of the net.

The most resonant of which was the network effect of content. Web 2.0 systems are like an onion, the open APIs allow layers of derivative content and services to be built on the core service like layers on an onion.

Tom claimed that the 'power' of the primary data source is enhanced by the empowerment of third parties to built these derivative services, so long as there is attribution back to the primary source. This mirrors Metcalfe's law that the power of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes on it.

Usually nodes are interpreted as people to understand the power of the net and the concept is well founded when you think of how the internet has become woven into the social and cultural fabric of modern society.

I found it interesting that as well as the network effect between consumers, society and organisations but also within the content itself amplifying the change that the internet brings like the marketing gap discussed earlier.

This explains some of the messianic talk around these services that has been likened to dot.com fervor of yore. The challenge to the suits is to understand it, understand the changes and deciding how to utilise it in a way that is equitable to consumers, business and society.

The chances are that they won't recognise the changes until they are already here.

Deep Thoughts: The Marketing Gap

I had an interesting discussion at Second Chance Tuesday with Helen Keegan. Helen is a mobile marketing expert, she runs Beepmarketing, is a part-time university lecturer and helps run the Swedish Beers networking group for people in the mobile space and blogs under the snappy moniker of TechnoKitten.

Helen highlighted that there was a generational fracture opening up between tween, teens and their older siblings currently studying to be marketers. Whilst both groups used mobile phones for social and leisure organisation, the students viewed the Internet and computing in a purely utilitarian sort of way.

Not one member of the students that she lectured were involved in participation media such as mobile blogging, blogging or photo sharing through Flickr, MySpace.com, Blogger, Textamerica or Moblog.

However Helen's 14 and 18-year old nieces are busy participating away on these services. The marketers of tomorrow far from being down with the kids will have a much greater gap from them than the likes of me. They have little understanding of how participation media can be used for marketing purposes and can't relate with their future consumers.

Given that the advantage of youth in understanding young consumers and bringing fresh perspectives are key selling points for their middle-class, middle-aged, middle-of-the-road employers, this 'marketing gap' is a bit of a problem. There is going to be a lot of broken careers and fat fees for agencies.

I was given a useful piece of advice when I went to college that a university education is as much about having the chance to read around and explore an area as what you are taught in the lecture hall. I hope that these future marketers are using their time wisely.

I carried on this process before I went to college and when I left college. Starting this blog was the same kind of process, finding out what the skinny was about the media of weblogs.

It's The New Style

The adidas boutique on Newburgh Street have some fly new colourways of ZX8000s in and a remake of sweatshirts designs originally worn in the Rocky films.

Whilst I won't be going with the pink ZX8000s there is a lot of other fly gear there. Get the full skinny here.

Second Chance Tuesday part two

I managed to get along later than I'd attended to Second Chance Tuesday. I was surprised by the formality of clientele at the event. I had expected the usual monied suits, but the entrepreneurs where where suited and booted as well.

There were precious few PR people (with only Adrian Chitty and Simone Carr on the registered list), but then not using PR and marketing is seen as a badge of honour amongst the boot-strapped Web 2.0 set.

A couple of the people that I'd met:

Rob Eberstein of i-Zebra thinks that push technology is now finally ready to arrive almost ten years after the initial promise and non-delivery of PointCast. Universal broadband access, faster cheaper computing and storage being the key facilitators. Watch this space once the fall out of stealth mode some time in April.

Caroline Teunissen of Vividas PLC told me about their streaming video product which is platform-agnostic being based on Java. At first when I heard about it, I was reminded of the Compound Document concept of the early and mid 1990s (the most famous use being the CyberDog web browser for the Mac). Both player and stream are transferred to the client device at viewing time. I am reliably informed by my friendly web maven that the quality of the video streams even when viewed on a 20" monitor at full screen compares favourably with against competing products.

Jargon Watch

BEAM - A four-letter-acronym for biology, electronics, aesthetics and mechanics which are apparently the four pillars for designing successful robot technology according to robosapien creator Mark Tilden.

Using nature as a guide to motion, control, visualisation from robosapien to the robo-carp at the London Aquarium. (Kudos to the You Review Network)

Blogosphere update

David Sifry of Technorati has an interesting blog posting about the growth of the blogosphere. About 50 per cent of blogs are still going after three months, blogging is now becoming a habitual experience for Joe Six-Pack. The blogosphere doubles in size every five and a half months or so. 2.7 million blogs are updated on a weekly basis

Not surprisingly spam is an issue, with fake pings acting as a denial of service attack against Technorati. About nine per cent of blogs are search engine spam attempts including machine-created blogs.

Jargon Watch

Sping - A spam ping. A ping is the automatic signal that blogging tools send out when a new post has been created. Kudos to David Sifry.

Built to flip - Not one of them soft-top Suzuki jeeps with the Rhino vinyl wheel cover on the back that hairdressers used to drive, but the return by Web 2.0 companies to a business model of coming up with a new product and then being bought out by Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft (delete as appropriate). A sign that we're living in bubblicious times again. Kudos to Om Malik.

Class Envy

There was an interesting opinion piece The Great Divide by James Delingpole in the Sunday Times Style magazine (February 5, 2006) about a division in the middle classes between the haves and the have-nots.

The haves stay in Tuscany and go on ski-ing holidays. My own thoughts on this is that the working classes haven't gone away, they just slave away with a phone, the laptop and the Blackberry.

The have-nots referred to in the article are the normal working-class folk of yore. They are the infantry of the knowledge economy. In place of soot-covered waste coats or donkey-jackets it's suits-and-ties or media casual.

I have no problem calling myself working-class. I learned my trade as a PR person by working with great people in the same way that I served my time as an apprentice in the chemical industry in my early 20s.

They have the same fears as the working-class of past decades with the fear of their jobs being exported to India or China rather than seeing their factory closed down by foreign competition. Self-service online and IT-driven business process management in banks has replaced robots and automation on the factory floor.

I found it particularly interesting that Delingwood assigned education and politeness with middle-class society. The working-class neighbourhood I grew up in was not full of cavemen: respect for yourself and others was something that was drilled into me. Indeed, I still occasionally have that uniquely Irish refrain from my mother asking me 'not to disgrace the family-name' ringing in my ears.

I worked in many jobs from managing a tightly knit production team, to working on a factory line, being a cleaner, being part of a call-centre hive, banking and working in PR. It was in the middle-class environs of the PR agency life where I saw the most morally repugnant mistreatment of fellow colleagues and peers practiced.

With regards education, there has been a long tradition of a well-read working class, indeed some of the 'new' universities sprang out of mechanics institutes and other places of working-class education. The things that stood me in good stead for working in the knowledge economy were:

• The wide range of reading that I did whilst working shifts in the oil industry and have carried on since
  
• The work ethic that my gaffer taught me as an apprentice
• A practical approach to problem solving that I picked up working in the chemical industry

The under-class of today are the dispossessed bypassed by the knowledge economy, rather like the farm workers left by land reforms and the industrial age. The working-class education is now a combination of the state education system, public libraries and the worldwide web were institutions like MIT Open Courseware and Wikipedia which equate to the mechanics institute of today.

It will be interesting to see if or how these new working-classes get organised. If you have any thoughts feel free to use the comment facility.

Second Chance Tuesday

OK, so this is not for those of you who think that Web 2.0 is drinking the last chance saloon.

First Tuesday was a networking event whose name became a lightning rod for all things dot.com. The idea was to put together dot.com entrepreneurs, interested third parties (like PR agencies hungry for business) and venture capitalists in the same room to socialise, exchange business cards and hopefully be the genesis of a number of fruitful business relationships.

First Tuesday grew into a monster, the London meetings were held in big cavernous venues like Fabric nightclub in London. You can check out their broken site here.

Anyway the nice people at The Glasshouse have resurrected the format in a homage to First Tuesday with the catchy name Second Chance Tuesday. More details on the first London meeting here.

Selling Palm by the pound

The Good Morning Silicon Valley newsletter carried a story about Palm’s largest shareholders asking the company to sell out to another player while its fortunes are still on the rise. This raises concerns about Palm’s roadmap and vision if even their largest shareholders don’t believe them.

Why sell out?

Palm has a number of challenges to overcome:

• Maintaining relationships with distribution channels which are different and distinct for both the Treo and PDA ranges

• Innovation and localisation: in order to keep its head above water in the PDA market Palm needs to innovate, Pocket PC manufacturers can leverage reference designs and even sell devices at a loss to support service businesses in the enterprise. In the cell phone market, Palm needs to localise the device to meet each carriers needs.

• Make like Dell: Palm not only needs to get better at innovation and localisation, it needs to innovate operationally; something that had a positive transformative effect on Apple. Dell is a by-word for a slick logistics chain that keeps cost down and allows for user customisation at the order stage

• One-trick pony: when HP goes into business it is looking to sell everything from a HP9000 Superdome high-end computer to an iPaq and the services to support it. When Nokia speaks to carriers it can sell them everything from all the kit to run a network to budget phones for PAYG (Pay-As-You-Go) customers

• Convergence: cell phones now have PDA functionality and so do iPods, Palm has unsuccessfully tried to make a convergence play with the LifeDrive and seems to have a crisis of ideas

• Get big or get out: As can be seen from the MP3 player market, where there is a hot, competitive sector size wins because it can bring economies of scale to bear. Palm could not have taken the gamble that Apple did in terms its forward contracts for flash memory to role out a flash-based LifeDrive even if it had the vision to do so.

Who should buy?

A lot of the heat in this discussion centres on Research In Motion, Nokia and Apple.

Research in Motion has never had the best product design and user experience, Palm could help them.

Palm’s pen computing experience could be invaluable to Nokia.

Apple is the collectively the player considered by technology pundits the people who can make a market work and has the expertise and chutzpah to make change the game devices work. Palm could bring carrier relationships and expertise.

Why buy?

Palm has a strong brand its name has been a by-word for PDAs for a long time. The Treo has made a name for itself amongst early adopters and has proven itself to be more adaptable than the Blackberry. Its product design has made it a success that has saved Palm up to now. However, much of the crown jewels within Palm (its distinctive look and feel) marched off with PalmSource acquisition by Access and even then there was a lot of work to be done to assure the future of the PalmOS as a modern platform.

• If Apple wanted to build a Palm-like device it already has much of the expertise needed, arguably the best product design team in the world and it could license or buy the PalmOS software from Access. However, this would necessitate a hell of a lot of work during the time that the company is migrating its hardware and software to the Intel platform and rolling out new entertainment services. This means that a Palm-like Apple device is probably not likely

• Research in Motion could poach a few of the Palm design team and licence the PalmOS software, but it has bigger issues as competitors are using the NTP case as an excuse to eat the companies lunch. In addition, services and software are more lucrative so there is already some industry signs that RIM are looking to move away from being a hardware player

• Nokia has some of the best mobile phone designers in the world, the user experience of its Symbian phones rivals Palm. It makes sense only as a way to eliminate competition, but it would be more profitable to tempt key staff away and watch Palm nose-dive into wherever dead companies go

Conclusion

OK, first of all there is the question of whether Palm needs to be sold: probably not, but a shot of energy, vision and cajones in the management team wouldn't go a miss and this shareholder action may be the boot in the backside that they need. Bottom line is that this question can get kicked back and forth for a long time to come, what's more its an emotive area so don't expect a consensus soon.

If a 'for sale' sign went up, Palm may get a buyer, but I would expect the purchaser to come from the Far East rather than the established tech players named. I would also expect them to buy if or when the company is on its knees. Ningbo Bird, Haier, Lenovo, BenQ or HTC for example already know how to make phones, if they want cute industrial design they can buy it in as necessary from IDEO, frog design or their ilk. If the company did tout around for a buyer, you could expect the business to drop as carriers and enterprise look for alternative 'safer' suppliers. If the business isn't on its knees when the for sale sign goes up, it may be by the time the deal is signed.

The crown jewels: the PalmOS software is already available to whoever wants to licence it at a discount to Windows Mobile, the value would be in the carrier relationships and the brand recognition of the Palm name.

UPDATE: Palm Addicts ran this piece in full, you can find it here.

In praise of the day-pass

I first came across the day-pass concept with Salon.com, its an interesting compromise between subscription content and 'free content'.

First of all, with the possible exception of consumer homepages there's little free content on the web. Content that you don't have to pay for has advertisements around the sides of the pages and in the text, these are often paid for on a 'per click' basis.

Self described 'premium' publications like the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal go for a walled-garden approach where you have a paid for subscription and they vend the content out.

I consider this to be going after short-term gains and sacrificing their future.

The day-pass says my content is valuable; however if you engage with my sponsor, they will pay for your access to my content over the next 24-hours. It means I have a moral contract with them to listen to their sponsor (and actually Aviva the insurance company did a smart bit of work by tailoring their content to deliver their message to an Economist reader whilst at the same time getting over their positioning as a progressive innovative company), I understand the 'real value' of the content that I get to look at AND the publisher remains relevant to a modern net audience rather than trapped in the dead forest business.

As Oscar Wilde said it is better to be talked about than not be talked about; in the online world, getting talked about means that you have to be accessible. Bloggers will tend not to blog about sites were people cannot go and see the content in context, for instance I have reduced the number of links I have to New York Times stories because of their part-way subscription model.

During my day pass tour of the Economist, I came across a series of trend articles and a number of interesting podcasts for download touching on some of the editorial teams hot topics for 2005: economic change

• The future of the oil market by oil maven Daniel Yergin (I recommend his book The Prize which is a history of the petroleum sector as excellent reading)
• The state of America under George W Bush and the key issues of Iraq, Iraq, Iraq
• The progress of democratic institutions in Muslim societies as a bulwark against terrorism
• The fight against flab in western countries
• The tensions bubbling under in China as the proletariat clash with the economic boom
• Changing the market and role of video games
• The permanent change in Japanese politics, the positive legacy of Junichiro Koizumi
• The rise of India on the world stage in terms of political and economic power
• Fixing development efforts in the third-world
• The old-age bomb in western societies
• The expected consolidation in the hedge fund market around clear winners