Frogs, fake coins and drivers license photos.

August 25th, 2010

Is all this technology just making processes even more complicated that they were?

I don’t know about you but I sometimes find maintaining the on-line lifestyle that has developed around us quite a challenge. My email seems to consist of a constant stream of on-line statement alerts from credit cards and bank accounts, requests for me to register on-line and ‘go paperless’ and demands from airlines for me to ‘check in’. 

It would be interesting to analyze how much time we spend maintaining this type of stuff. And what did we do before all this on-line engagement? Drop into the bank to pay a bill. Stand in line at airports to check in with bulky paper travel documents that arrived in the mail weeks before. Write letters to credit card companies to tell them we had changed address.

frogOn a recent trip back to the UK I spent a day dealing with personal admin that can get even more complicated when your life exists in more than one country. One item in the mail was a letter from the DVLA (The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency – the body in the UK responsible for issuing your driving license) informing me that my UK photo driving license was about to expire. The options were to rescind it as I no longer needed to drive; do nothing in which case it would be cancelled and should I drive in the UK after expiration I could face a fine of £1,000; or renew the license by confirming some personal details and providing a photo of myself that was less than 30 days old. This option was accompanied by a further stream of requirements – in the photo I should keep my mouth closed, not smile, remove my glasses if I wore them, make sure my eyes were open, ensure no-one else was in the picture, etc, etc.

There were two more options. I could acquire the required photo and mail it to the DVLA with the signed application form and fee of £20. Alternatively, I could visit a main Post Office where they would take my picture for me and electronically transfer the details to the DVLA. With this option there was an additional £4.50 charge but my application would be guaranteed as correct by the Post Office and my new drivers license would be with me in less than 7 days. I thought I would take this option and headed off to a main Post Office near me that I identified via a quick search on the web site detailed on the application form.

 At the Post Office, I asked at the Customer Service desk and was directed to a booth with curtains around it. I felt a little uncomfortable about entering the booth but once inside I was faced with a high tech counter, a complex looking camera with a tracking system to adjust to my height and a pleasant Post Office clerk behind a glass screen who started to process my details. All was going to plan at this stage.

The time came to take the photo. The clerk tried to adjust the camera up via her control panel but it appeared to be stuck. ‘We’ve had a lot of kids in this week’ she smiled. ‘I think it’s broken!’ After a few more tries and the assistance of a colleague they reached the conclusion it was broken. I could now travel to another main Post Office (about half an hour drive away) or simply go back to the more conventional method – get a photo of myself and mail it in. I asked the clerk where the nearest photo booth was and she said she thought there was one in Tesco (the UK’s leading supermarket chain) just down the street. Slightly irritated, I set off to Tesco.

The Tesco store was an older, town center store. It was uncharacteristic of Tesco’s modern, 24 hour, out-of-town stores but I quickly found the photo booth. It required 4 x £1 coins, which was exactly what I had in my pocket. I sat in the booth, read the operating instructions and inserted the 4 £1 coins. The last coin was rejected several times and on closer inspection I realized it was a fake! I’d read in a newspaper on the plane that hundreds of thousands of fake £1 coins were circulating in the UK. They were made of lead and sprayed gold to resemble the real £1 coin. The problem was so rife and there were so many in circulations that most stores just accepted them as regular currency. The modern photo booth on the other hand was having none of it – its complex coin recognition technology was functioning perfectly!

I tried to eject the 3 £1 coins already accepted by the machine to no avail. It constantly requested me to insert another £1 coin that I did not have. In the end I got out of the booth and looked for the customer service desk aware that someone else could take advantage of my situation and enter the booth, add a £1 coin and get their photo done. A store assistant told me that there was no customer service desk in this older store and that I should speak to the operator on the far till. He was helpful and said someone would be with me shortly so I returned to the booth to guard against someone else jumping in. After 10 minutes or so, no one had arrived to help me so I returned to the operator. He looked apologetic and said he would be with me shortly.

I went back to the booth. Not wanting to be beaten by the booth or the fake coin, I looked again at the instructions and it appeared to say that I could have an option of just 1 photo instead of the customary set of 4 for just £1. Perfect! I only needed the one.

I started adjusting the seat so I was at the correct height indicated on the screen and pressed the green button.

‘Ready? Smile!’ a happy electronic voice announced. And with a flash it was all over

‘Smile’ I thought. I’m not allowed to do that according to the instructions.

 It was then that I realized to my horror that I had selected an option obviously developed for kids. The £1 option was for a picture of my head superimposed on a range of cool backgrounds. In this case my head had been superimposed on a cartoon picture of a frog sat on a lily pad! As the delightful portrait was printing out, the store clerk arrived to assist me. ‘I’m not sure that’s going to work on my drivers license’, I said showing him the picture. He laughed.

 Well, I’m not sure what the moral of this story is? I quite like our self-service, on-line world but I sometimes wonder whether all this technology makes the process even more complicated than it was before. All I can say is that my kids loved the picture of me as a frog. And the store clerk swapped my fake £1 coin for a real one and just dropped the fake one in his till to go back into circulation.

3 Steve

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Plan A (because there is no Plan B)

June 15th, 2010

Going green and making money

We’ve all heard so much about ‘going green’ over the last few years. With the oil disaster in the Gulf looming large, finding more sustainable ways to live will come into ever greater focus. If there is a positive side to the disaster, it will be that the US reassesses a way of life heavily dependent on energy that generates 25.2% of global carbon emissions from roughly 4.6% of the global population.

For business, the challenge has always been the cost of going green. The perception is that changing the way we do business – the transporting of goods, travelling to work, heating and cooling premises, waste – will require costly and fundamental changes to our infrastructure.

About three years ago, we came up with a concept we called Greenguage. It was a web-based platform designed to allow companies to engage employees on the subject of more sustainable ways of working. Generally we always find that internal corporate communications need to be brief and to the point to work in a world where we suffer from information overload. With Greenguage, we found the opposite – users wanted rich content on the subject of sustainability. They wanted to learn about and understand the issues. The core of the application was an area where employers could set behavior objectives for employees for which they would earn points. For example, running a meeting via videoconference rather than getting everyone to travel to one location would earn points. Sharing a car with a colleague to travel to work would earn points. And so on. The platform featured a green catalog where employees could spend their points. The catalog featured sustainable things – torchlight’s you shook to make them work rather than using disposable batteries, wooden balls you put in the washing machine to reduce the amount of detergent used and charitable options such as ‘planting a tree’.

At the time I had read about one of the UK’s leading retailers, Marks & Spencer, setting the objective of totally neutralizing their impact on the environment by changing the way they worked. They called it Plan A, (because there is no Plan B). I made contact with the team at M&S and asked them if we could show them Greenguage and they agreed. They decided not to go with our idea as they had already gone some way to developing another route internally but we received an enthusiastic reception and got great insight into what they were doing. Their plans were ambitious and I must admit I was a little skeptical of their chances of success. The plans looked costly and there was a danger they would just be paying lip service to the issue for PR purposes.

Three years later M&S has just published some results of what they have achieved. They make fascinating reading.

Their own estimate was that the changes would cost them in the region of $60 million to implement. The reality is that they did incur that cost but they calculate they have made savings in the region of $70 million. Less waste, less packaging, lower fuel consumption. In addition they’ve connected with existing and new customers and developed new products and services. They launched the M&S Energy brand that supplies domestic heating energy but focuses on the proper insulation of homes. They have attracted over 300,000 customers in under a year. M&S claim they are on target to be the first retailer globally to achieve 100% sustainability by 2015 – and they’ve making money from it!

We never got Greenguage properly off the ground for many reasons. In the main companies couldn’t be convinced that the cost of implementing it would generate a payback. I think M&S have proved them wrong.

The technology that we built for Greenguage is still there. I’d happily dust it down and re-engineer it if there are any takers!

Steve

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“I Want To Hold Your Hand”

May 27th, 2010
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I must admit I’ve never been a great Beatles fan. I was a 60’s child but a little too late to experience the free thinking sixties and all that went with them. That said I understand the Beatles significance and the difference they made to the world I now live in. Music has always been one of my great passions and many great songs remind me of a specific time or period of my life. I think it’s the same for most of us.

Grass Roots has just published a major piece of research conducted amongst large corporations – Fortune 500 or Financial Times Global 500 constituents. We’ve called it ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ after that famous Beatles song, (more on that later). Our industry, the performance improvement industry, like many others has been talking about globalization for years. We wanted to understand what these corporations were thinking about taking their employee reward and recognition programs global and their definition of the global space. The results are fascinating and I urge you to download a copy of the research findings: “I want to hold you hand” whitepaper.

I remember being taught about globalization at school in the early 80’s. The truth is that it hasn’t really happened. We see many corporations trading around the world but the reality is that they are just a collection of local operating companies trading under the same brand but with different products, different cultures and different philosophies.

As we come out of the worst economic decline the world has seen since the Second World War, (and hopefully we are not going to take a ‘double dip’), globalization is once more on the agenda.
This time I think it’s for real. There appear to be two key motivators.

Cost
 As profits have been hit, corporations are looking for costs savings wherever they can find them. Harmonizing employee recognition programs around the world is just one way of doing it. Grass Roots have seen a massive increase in global RFP’s (Requests For Proposals) in recent months. One recent RFP from a global financial services brand included a PowerPoint slide that showed they were running over 30 employee recognition programs around the world with as many vendors.
One vendor and one platform would obviously bring savings,

Growth
Growth in sales for the major corporations over the last 15 years or so has come mainly from the established economies of North America, Europe and Japan. The recession is telling them that this is not guaranteed as we move into the recovery phase – many of these economies have deep, underlying structural problems that may take years to resolve. Just look at the economic deflation experienced by Japan during most of the last 12 years for an indicator. The BRIC, (Brazil, Russia, India and China), economies is where it’s at. (I have some views on this Goldman Sachs coined acronym, but more on that in a later blog.) To access these markets, harmonizing corporate culture and philosophy has never been more important. Often these economies are challenging places in which to operate and that brings even more emphasis on how you align your employees behavior to corporate values.

As motivators of corporate success go, there’s nothing new in cost reduction and looking for growth
I suppose. After the economic turmoil of the last 2 years at least some constants remain.

Back to the Beatles.
They released “I want to hold your hand” as a single in 1963. In the US, it sold more than 250,000 copies in the first three days of release with over 10,000 copies an hour being sold in New York alone. The song has received many awards amongst which include the number 2 slot on Mojo’s “100 records that have changed the world”.

Using the song to name the survey goes back to a discussion I had with a global medical equipment company based out of the US in early 2010. They were struggling with the global thing but I don’t think they were convinced about the genuine strengths of Grass Roots in the global space. I ended a call with their key influencer with the line, ‘If you want us to hold your hand on the global journey, give me a call’, I wasn’t convinced I would get a reply but some week later I received a call from her. ‘Will you hold our hand’, she said.

Steve

An internal Grass Roots contest took place in April 2010
amongst all our offices around the world.
Each office needed to produce a full inspirational video of the song.
Here is the American version. Enjoy!

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With the number of cell phone subscribers in the world approaching 5 billion, more people have access to a phone than to good sanitation.

April 19th, 2010

 

What’s that got to do with motivation?

There was a recent report from the United Nations that stated that the number of cell phone subscribers in the world is just about to pass 5 billion. By their reckoning, more people will have a cell phone than have access to clean sanitation.

What does that tell us about the motivation of human beings? In all my years of devising reward, recognition and incentive programs, I have always urged clients to think about what I call the “Three A’s” when it comes to establishing what is going to motivate your audience.

The first A is for Achievability. If someone looks at a program and thinks, ‘I am never going to achieve that!’, then they are unlikely to subscribe to the objectives of the program and it has failed at the first hurdle. The solution is to set the objectives at an achievable level and push them up as participants begin to achieve. It’s a bit like the high jump in athletics. More valuably, it gives the program manager the opportunities to keep the program interesting and engaging by continuously refocusing on the objectives.

From a cell phones perspective, the third world is an interesting environment. The Financial Times recently reported that Vodafone is launching a simple ‘phone only’ application for certain African countries that retails for around $10. Even with some of the frighteningly low per capita incomes in Africa, that has to be achievable. It’s an interesting contrast to the richer nations where the humble cell phone is becoming a thing of the past – everyone wants to pay more for an iPhone, BlackBerry or iPad.

The second A is for Aspiration. I always encourage clients to take the mundane out of their reward choice on an incentive program. That’s why cash is such a bad currency for these types of program – it just goes into cash-flow and we don’t feel good about using our reward to pay for the groceries, a parking ticket or, dare I say it, a new toilet. It’s so much better to work towards something you really aspire to – travel, the latest laptop or a cell phone.

The last A is for Appropriateness. I remember a few years ago there was outrage when one company was offering cosmetic surgery as a reward. We’ve had companies ask us to remove alcohol from the reward choice. Others feel it inappropriate to offer competitors products.

All of these are valid reasons but where does that leave the basic sanitation. Appropriate maybe, but when you don’t have very much in the first place, possibly not an aspiration or achievable.

Steve.

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What has dance music in common with great corporate communications?

March 30th, 2010

I went to the 2010 Ultra Music Festival this year – the culmination of the Miami Winter Music Conference that runs for a week every March. The Ultra runs for the last 2 days of the week with the focus on heavy dance music, club DJ’s and electronica. The top attractions for me this year were Faithless, Groove Armada, Orbit and Dutch DJ Tiesto amongst others.

The average age of the audience was probably around 20 but there was a good smattering of grey hair amongst the 100,000 plus crowd. I didn’t feel too out of place! Why did I go? Well, since my early teens I have always loved dance music. Maybe I don’t dance too well and my joints are a little stiff after 24 hours of it but it still makes me feel very alive. I read a quote in a copy of  The Week today, (13th March 2010), by Howard Jacobson, (a great British novelist who wrote wonderful books including The Making of Henry), that went, “This is perhaps the most shocking thing about getting old, that everywhere except the body you aren’t”. Well I don’t see myself as getting old yet but maybe that’s his point.

With all great experiences, I try and take something from them. For me, the Ultra was a great lesson in the power of leadership. How is it that a man standing in front of an array of complex electronic kit, synching dance tracks on his Apple Mac and accompanied by amazing visual effects and lights can quite literally co-ordinate tens of thousands of people to behave in the same way. They all chant, raise their arms and move in fantastic synchronization. He applauds them and they applaud back. Together, they seem to be in total bliss.

Coming back to the rather more sober world of employee behavior, there are some lessons here on how we communicate with our people. Make them familiar with the message, (all of the DJ’s crowd new the tracks he was playing), be consistent in the way it’s delivered and communicate it in a way that is memorable and you have a good chance that they will come with you. Above all though, keep it simple and make it fun.

My favorite performance from the festival, if you’re interested? Groove Armada’s “Paper Romance”

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Who’s to blame?

March 4th, 2010

 

Nobody can have missed the Toyota recall story. It was all over the media.

I watched Toyota President Akio Toyoda, (great grandson of the founder), testify in front of three Congressional Committees. I couldn’t help feel for him. After all, he was dragged in front of a braying audience of American congressmen in a country that was alien to him. Many would question the motives of the congressmen which probably had little to do with whether a Toyota Prius was going to stop when you hit the brakes and more to do with their personal profiles. I’m also sure that under the very conservative, considerate and polite nature of Japanese culture he would not have expected the same treatment at home. No wonder he looked nervous!

Something I have always instilled in my colleagues is that if something goes wrong, don’t dwell on it. Analyze what happened and try and understand why, take two or three learning points from the situation, learn from them and move on. I know it’s not always as clean cut as that but I have found it a good rule to follow over the years.

It takes me back to something I learnt back in the 90’s when I was working for a major retail bank. I was seconded to the Total Quality team for 18 months. Back then, Total Quality, or Total Quality Management (TQM) as it was commonly referred to, was all the rage. It was the latest management fad that was going to propel companies into a new era of harmony with ones customers and staff because everything would work as it was meant to. There were many gurus on the subject as their always are and my bank followed the teachings of Phillip Crosby, an ex ITT executive who had made a small fortune advising and guiding organizations through the TQM maze. He wrote a book called ‘Quality is Free’ in 1980. You couldn’t argue with much that Mr. Crosby preached as it was common sense – he just packaged it in a way that was easy for most of us to digest.

That said, part of his teaching which I have always followed is that organizations should adopt a ‘no blame culture’. The theory went that when something goes wrong in an organization, the tendency is for management to look for an individual or group onto which they can pin the blame. As we all know, that rarely resolves the problem. The reality is that when you analyze the cause of any failing, you begin to see that it is outdated processes, poor education and antiquated working practices that usually cause the errors. The individual is just a cog in the corporate machine and will keep doing the same thing, regardless of whether it’s right for the organization or not, until the process is changed. Crosby also taught that the best positioned individuals in an organization capable of identifying how processes should be changed are not the highly skilled and highly paid executives but the guy who works the process everyday and usually takes the flack from customers when things go wrong. Give him the right education and tools and he will come up with a solution. How many times have you heard in a store, at the airport or in a hotel when something goes wrong – ‘I’m just doing my job. What they need to do is x but who am I to tell them?’

 So going back to Mr. Toyoda, sure Toyota is going to suffer some reputation and market share damage over the short to medium term but it’s a strong and respected business and I don’t doubt it will recover. As for those Congressmen in Washington, they might think they have the right man but they haven’t. In fact, there isn’t a right man. Something is wrong with the processes in Toyota and I have every confidence they will work with their employees to find a solution.

It won’t stop me smiling at the bumper sticker I saw recently. ‘If you can read this and are driving a Toyota, you’re too close. Try your brakes’.

Steve

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Appropriate ways to motivate your employees

January 25th, 2010

I was recently reading an interview with Jeffrey Katzenberg, (he was the CEO of Disney, ousted by family members I seem to recall and is the ‘K’ in the DreamWorks SKG film company – the ‘S’ is Steven Spielberg and ‘G’ is David Geffen if you were wondering!), where the interviewer asks him to comment on his legendry work ethic and what he expects of others who work for him. His reply: ‘If you don’t come in Saturday, don’t bother coming in Sunday’. That made me ask myself the question, ‘How does that relate to what we at Grass Roots promote in the performance improvement industry?’

Not very well, I think. Quite apart from the work-life balance concept, in our world we work with employers to develop programs that positively improve behavior and drive performance by motivating and recognizing their employees. There is still a school of thought out there that says, ‘they’re paid a salary to come to work so why should I do anything else?’, although I’m pleased to say we see less and less of that attitude. That said, with the popularity of programs such as The Apprentice that relies on the ‘You’re Fired!’ approach, we may not have come as far as I would have hoped.

I always think that when setting objectives for employees during their working lives, there are three properties we need to strive for. They are what I call The Three A’s – Aspiration, Achievability and Appropriateness.

With aspiration, we need to set goals and objectives that employees feel they want to achieve. I see many contact centers introduce programs that focus on productivity – how many calls you handle in an hour, what your wrap up time is, how much CRM data did you capture from the customer. There’s nothing wrong with those objectives as they will reflect the business drivers but let’s be honest, working in a contact center can be a pretty thankless existence. If that’s all you’re measured on, it’s no wonder the staff turnover rates in the contact center industry are so high. Why not focus on delighting customers, making customers feel they have been treated well or their questions answered fully. Then the customers thank our workers, they will feel good about themselves and proud of their roles. They will aspire to delight more and more and productivity will probably exceed the objectives we set earlier.

On achievability, I have to tell you the story about the founder of a mobile phone retailer client we worked for a few years ago. This guy was a self made billionaire and at heart he was a pure salesman. His turnover of staff in sales was catastrophic, exceeding 100%. Theoretically he was losing and replacing his entire salesforce every year – he employed over 6000 sales staff! He wanted us to tell him why so we took a look at the way he ran the business. Once a year he would hold a conference for all his sales staff – he would walk onto the stage in a cloud of puffing dry ice, flanked by two heavies. In each arm he held a glass brief case which was hand cuffed to his wrists and clearly containing dollar bills. He would hold the cases in the air and proudly announce, ‘There’s a million dollars in these cases. Do well and you could earn this next year’. The crowd would roar in appreciation.

I asked his HR guy some questions. How many of the 6000 salesforce earned a million dollars last year? One. How many earned half a million? None. How many earned a quarter of a million? One. And so we went on. The reality was that the vast majority of the 6000 took home less than $20,000 a year. What he was presenting to them was not far off promising they would win the lottery. This was just one of his unfortunate management styles. Needless to say, it was totally unachievable and sales personnel left his company in their droves.

Finally, appropriateness and I think this is where Mr. Katzenberg comes in. If you present your employees with something that is inappropriate, they will not be motivated. I’m sure he was being a bit tongue in cheek with his ‘Saturday, Sunday’ routine but these people do exist. Look out for them! As for the mobile phone billionaire, he sold the business and last I heard he was floating around the world on his yacht.

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So what were the big stories at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas?

January 11th, 2010

Overwhelmingly everyone was talking about Apps. For those of you not yet addicted to your Apple iPhone, and increasingly the BlackBerry, Apps are simple software applications designed to run on your smart phone and specifically to fulfill a single requirement. You download them from the Internet. Apple has a whole App Store with thousands available. Be it ordering a pizza, checking your stock prices or using Twitter and Facebook from your smart phone, there is an App for just about everything. In fact, someone told me about an App called DrunkDial, (I think that’s what it was called). You install it on your phone and connect it to the phone numbers of friends you have a tendency to call when you’ve had one too many and potentially embarrass or compromise yourself. Launch DrunkDial when you hit the bar and bingo, it stops you dialing those unfortunate friends.

Another story was of the two software engineers who had developed an App called The Moron Test in their spare time – it lets you know how stupid you really are! Now it’s generating enough monthly revenues to allow them to quit their jobs.

Apps are big business. Some are free, some you pay for and there’s a whole industry developing them for the iPhone. BlackBerry are fast trying to catch up and were showing there Alliance Portal at the show (developed for BlackBerry by Grass Roots I hasten to add). The Portal is a social network type environment where developers can share ideas and link to BlackBerry to promote their Apps and wares to the growing army of BlackBerry users. I read that Steve Jobs of Apple was not that enthusiastic about Apps when the iPhone was launch a few years ago – now Apps form a central plank to the Apple iPhone strategy as it fights for dominance with BlackBerry, the emergence of Google Android and the entrance of players such as Microsoft and Dell into the smart phone market.

I read in a recent Financial Times article that they estimate that there are currently over 100,000 people trying to develop an App. Obviously some of them will be huge successes. Others will fall by the wayside unnoticed. I was pondering this new world and it took me back to my teens. As a teenager, I was obsessed by pop music. In those days, the 45rpm single was king and any connected teenager could tell you what was number 1 in the charts and which was this weeks fastest mover or highest new entry. Back then in the UK, always a hot bed for new talent, as many 600 singles were released a week by aspiring rock stars. Most never even made it to a play on the radio, some were the launch pads for great British acts such as Tears for Fears, the Clash and the Pet Shop Boys, (depending on your musical taste, of course). I suppose Apps could be seen as the current day pop singles. Toggling through my iPod as I sit on my flight back from Las Vegas to find something to listen to I can’t help feeling that in 20 plus years time, my kids will not be toggling through their smart phones to find that classic App from their teens! A sign of the disposable world we live in.

So where does that leave the motivation and incentives industry? For me, the core of any successful incentive or loyalty program has to be the communications. If you go back to the roots of our industry in direct marketing, think about the process that you as consumers are engaged. I often use what I call the ‘cornflake packet’ example. You get up in the morning, sit down for breakfast and you choose cornflakes. As you work your way through your serving, you glance at the packet on the table. There’s an offer flashed on the front so you pick the packet up and turn it around to read more about the offer. It could be a free flight, a two for one offer or in today’s world maybe a free App. You read about how you participate. If we haven’t got it in 20 or 30 seconds, we’re back working on the bowl of cornflakes in front of us.

That’s the challenge faced by any incentive program, be it for employees, the channel or consumers. The boom in social networking – MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest, offers us a huge opportunity to improve the way we use communications as part of these programs. With these new technologies, our program participants are now quickly accessible in a very cost effective and personal way. At Grass Roots we’ve already started experimenting how we can link these applications to the programs we run for our clients. The BlackBerry Alliance Portal is just one example and we’re getting interesting and very encouraging results.

So are Apps the new pop charts? Well all I know that is if you love great music with a great bass line as I do try the new Dr Dre headphones launched by Monster at 2010 CES. http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/review-beats-by-dr-dre-headphones-20080730/.

Rock n roll!

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What shape is the economic recovery – at CES 2010 this week

January 6th, 2010

This time last year Grass Roots attended the International Consumer Electronics Show 2009 in Las Vegas. As acknowledged leaders in developing and managing incentive programs for the channel, particularly in the tech and telecoms space, attending CES is a good opportunity for the Grass Roots team to meet up with clients and network with the industry for new opportunities.

In fact, from the CES newspaper which is published daily during the show, we identified that Grass Roots works with 29 of the Top 50 electronics brands at CES 2009. I’m on my way to 2010 CES 2010 now and it will be interesting to see how we do this year.

In 2009, CES contained the normal hype of new launches and industry announcements together with exhausting rounds of “after show” parties hosted by the big brands. There were a few black clouds in the normally clear Nevada skies because as we now know, we were at the depths of the worst recession most of us have seen in our living memories.

It was the most frightening time I’ve experienced in my career having travelled through at least two previous downturns – in the final quarter of 2009, clients literally cancelled programs at a moments notice, put them on indefinite hold or commenced major supplier reviews and supplier rationalisation processes. They were black days indeed and I must admit I did not shed a tear at the turn of the year. It was good riddance to 2009!

That said, what does 2010 hold for us all? The BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies with the exception of Russia seem to be recovering strongly if they went into recession at all. The US economy seems to be staggering into recovery but the huge levels of national debt are worrying pundits. The Eurozone seems to be recovering although Greece and Ireland face serious financial challenges and there are worrying noises about the state of public finances in the UK.

In our line of business I’ve always had the advantage of being able to talk to senior people in business that are at the coal face of industry. I’ve found that you can get a good view of how things are doing “from the horse’s mouth” if you ask the right questions.

In that polite banter we all undertake in business, I always try and ask the question: “How’s business?” People are always happy to talk about their own businesses and the answers are always insightful. Here are two contradicting examples which might indicate what we are in for in 2010:

In December I was travelling on a flight from the US to the UK and was sat next to a gentleman who was a senior manager at one of the world’s biggest container port operators. You couldn’t get a better indicator of global trade than container traffic movements so I posed the “How’s business?” question. His answer was startling.

His view was that at the depths of the recession in October and November 2009, container traffic volumes had “fallen off a cliff” declining some 30% to 40%. Since then, things had plateaued but now, in December 2009, volumes were falling dramatically again. “So we are in for the double dip recession then?” I responded. His response was even more alarming. His view was that we were on a “department store” shaped recession – you go down one floor on the elevator and walk around at bit at that level, travel down to the next floor and walk around a bit, then down again and so on to the ground floor! I relayed the gloomy story to my Board colleagues back in the UK.

A couple of weeks later I was at a conference in New York. I got chatting to a Senior VP at a global package and freight shipper we will all have almost certainly used at some point. Another great barometer of business activity, I thought and promptly asked her the “How’s business?” question. Her story paralleled the container story at first – volumes had fallen off a cliff in late 2009 and then plateaued. Now however, volumes were recovering strongly and investment plans that had been put on hold were coming back on stream.

Apart from the obvious conclusion about the world economy being an unpredictable beast, where does this story leave us? I’m not sure but I will keep asking the question of the people I meet at CES 2010.

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How we’re helping the Consumer Electronics industry

December 17th, 2009

There’s a very nice newsfactor.com article on how we’re helping the Consumer Electronics industry find efficient ways of managing increasingly complex distribution channels in today’s economy. Read it and let me know what you think.

The leaders in CE utilize Grass Roots’ global channel performance improvement software to achieve a positive influence on consumer attitudes and behaviors, which has been proven to drive employee engagement, brand recognition, loyalty, sales and productivity Relevant Products/Services.

We’ll be in Las Vegas for CES 2010 of course, offering demonstrations of our brand new Helix3 platform. Hopefully we can see some of you there. Stop by the booth and say hi.

Cheers!

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