Observe the cocktail party rule
This is the fifth in a series of blogs to mark National Storytelling Week 2017, focused on the words companies and brands use to tell their stories. Corporations that grow and endure over time can be justifiably proud of building a sustainable business. But boasting about how brilliant they are to demonstrate their superiority over […]
Use data and statistics to tell your tale
This is the fourth in a series of blogs to mark National Storytelling Week 2017, focused on the words companies and brands use to tell their stories. In their very readable book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, brothers Chip and Dan Heath quote the following statistic with self-conscious irony: “After […]
Beware the Curse of Knowledge
This is the third in a series of blogs to mark National Storytelling Week 2017, focused on the words companies and brands use to tell their stories. When you learn about a subject, you know more than most people. It’s impossible to unlearn what you’ve learned (though it is, of course, possible to forget). The […]
Keep it simple
This is the second in a series of blogs to mark National Storytelling Week 2017, focused on the words companies and brands use to tell their stories. When physicist Richard Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was asked if he could explain in just three minutes why he’d won the prize. In […]
Why companies need to get their story straight
Digital and social media have transformed communications. This is especially true for corporations and brands. Companies can no longer dictate what’s said about their products and services. Today, many more voices matter. Anyone with a social media profile and a WiFi connection can influence what people think about organisations. We’ve moved from unshakeable, unquestioned brand […]
Why companies and brands should make a Small Data resolution for 2017
Data has the power to transform all kinds of organisations – public and private sector, B2B and B2C, global and local. Every customer action, engagement and transaction generates potentially instructive and directional data. Retailers, for example, can see where and why their consumers lose interest and so can make things simpler or clearer to create […]
I’ve seen the future of learning – and I like it
Through persistence, making enquiries at the right time, and a healthy dose of good luck, I was privileged to attend last month’s RSA President’s Lecture. I was pleased to do so in this, the first year of my Fellowship of this most excellent organisation. The address was given by Simon Nelson, Founder of FutureLearn. He […]
Simplicity. Humanity. And purpose
Consumers have a paradoxical relationship with grocery products. Individually and day-to-day, they take up a vanishingly small part of our attention. Those that we use every day – from toothpaste and shampoo to tea and coffee – become part of our automatic habits and rituals and so they don’t even impinge on our consciousness. Yet […]
The trouble with “the trouble with millennials”
Something is rotten in the state of employment. If we don’t fix it, the very institution of work is at threat. And the thing that’s rotten is most rotten among millennials, that demonised generation born between the early 1980s and the year 2000. The generation beginning to form a more and more significant proportion of […]
Nice!
It’s said that English is an easy language to learn. Despite the oddities of pronunciation – cough, bough, enough – modern English is largely non-inflected; it doesn’t force lots of awkward endings and agreements on the building blocks of language. Verbs, nouns and adjectives. I’ve no idea whether English is easier to learn than other, more […]