As anyone in manufacturing knows, it’s a pretty exciting time right now. The industry is standing on the threshold of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – when the digital and physical worlds connect. For customers, it means things will do exactly what we want them to. For manufacturers, it means processes can revolve completely around customer […]

Each year, global PR firm Edelman releases its eagerly awaited Trust Barometer — a report charting the public’s trust in the media, business, government and NGOs across 28 developed countries. This year’s Trust Barometer, published back in January, showed how public trust in institutions fell significantly in 2016. Which makes sense considering this was the […]

We’ve talked before about the power of asking for feedback. As we’ve discovered, if you ask the right way, people are willing to be generous with their answers. You can (and should) ask your customers for reviews, then use them as valuable product feedback, powerful user-generated content (UGC) and peer-to-peer advocacy. But you should ask […]

The big trend in retail over the past few years has been towards personalisation: using consumer purchase data to create notifications and offers tailored to the individual customer. It’s happening online — in the form of personalised homepages or targeted e-receipts, on mobile — think loyalty apps or push notifications — and offline. In-store personalisation can range from beacon […]

What does social media engagement ACTUALLY look like? Is it a click, a scroll, a glance? Does a user have to comment, or share with their followers for it to count? I think we should be using a new yardstick – one which might be harder to measure, but that could bring long-term rewards. Different […]

Imagine paying a celebrity £75k to endorse your product on Facebook… while having no idea if you’ll get anything in return. That’s influencer marketing in 2017. You can probably think of better, and more sensible, ways of spending your money. £67k on a Youtube video or £53k for a Snapchat post, anyone? Thought not. Welcome […]

Imagine designing an airline for young adults — or “millennials”, as they’re called nowadays. Well, Air France has gone ahead and done just that. It’s called Joon (get it?), and it launches this fall. Here’s a not particularly helpful video they made to promote it: While we’re still waiting for full details about Joon, we know […]

You don’t have to be a massive consumer of news to see that there’s a crisis of confidence in social media right now. Anxiety over fake news factories and algorithm bubbles feeding us too much of what we want to hear is a huge issue in the public sphere, with 64% of Americans saying at […]

For years, user-generated content (UGC) has suffered from a bit of an image problem. If you’re a marketer, UGC might only mean reviews on a product page. And that’s absolutely fine. Reviews do work brilliantly at the point of purchase. But there’s a secret… and it’s getting out. Manufacturers and retailers (and smart brands in other […]