What’s in store for digital retailing and Scottish companies?

There’s been a consistent growth in UK one retailing for over a decade now. In fact, the number of UK citizens ordering goods electronically has increased significantly from an already impressive 44% in 2005 to a huge 79% in 2014. This means that nearly everyone with an Internet connection in the UK has now bought something online and actually makes us the biggest adopters of eCommerce in the EU.

This increase also shows no signs of stopping any time soon. All predictions are that more & more products of increasing complexity will be purchased via a browser or app in the future. You only have look back at the types of products bought online just a few years ago… cheap, simple, off-the-shelf, branded and easily packaged- such as books and CD’s (which is how Amazon started off). But now practically everything gets bought online including: complex, expensive, bespoke and considered products – from cruise packages thought to tailored fashion clothing and hand-made furniture if you so wish.

So in my view, the eCommerce future for Scottish companies is very bright and Scottish companies should be no different to any other in the UK when it comes to online selling. There’s still huge opportunities to sell products (and even services) to customers in the UK, Europe, North America and even further afield. Whether you come from the suburbs of London or the shores of Loch Ness, it is possible to sell to the global village of 3.2 Billion online users (which is about 40% of the world’s population).

Unsure what will sell? Well tastes and trends change across the globe, so you shouldn’t necessarily restrict the products that you offer online. There’s also no physical limits on space, so why not put everything online and see what gets bought?

The Future of Digital - thoughts Part 3

Further thoughts on the future of Digital, inspired by the Marketing Society's Digital Day 2015.

Q: What steps do you need to take to sustainably capitalise on the potential of digital within your business?

Collect and use data intelligently:
Whatever you do… ensure that you both collect data correctly and then use it in the best way possible to learn more and maximise value. E.g. Amazon, Google and Uber (as well as Scottish Unicorns: FanDuel & Skyscanner) have all built businesses based on interpreting and using data.

Think like a start-up:
With a small and dedicated team with the right combination of skills, experience and effort you can accelerate your digital output. Even the bigger digital-only businesses now buy smaller start-ups because they have the desire combination of product, skills and  intellectual property or just an idea.

Retain the best staff:
Keep the good ones and encourage the average ones to find out what they are good at. The biggest problems are those who have a misplaced sense of entitlement or use their efforts against others rather than as part of a team.

This is the third post on the Future of Digital, the first can be found here , the second can be found here.

The Future of Digital - thoughts Part 2

Further thoughts on the future of Digital, inspired by the Marketing Society's Digital Day 2015.

Q: How have digital channels evolved and what will be the next big digital trend to capitalise on?

The speed of digital change is getting quicker, learn to deal with it. Focus less on the next technology, device or trend and far more on making sure your organisation can complete (this means being innovative, agile and ready to learn from its mistakes). Apple's slogan at its recent product launch was "the only thing that's changed is everything" and this is right.  5 years ago the iPad launched, now I am seeing tablet numbers decline across a lot of client websites compared to mobile traffic.
More shocking is the fact that 52% of all the companies from the Fortune500 in 2000 now don't exist!


Q: Which new technologies are passing fads and which are game changers for their business?
Over time every technology will eventually become obsolete. NFC, wearables, home thermostats (The Internet of Things) connected to your app, etc. will all one day be the equivalent of the fax machine or the telex. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t investigate some and adopt different ones that either take your on your journey of digital maturity or that meet the needs of your customers.


This is the second post on the Future of Digital, the first can be found here.

The Future of Digital - thoughts Part 1

Following on from some questions I was asked at the Marketing Society's Digital Day 2015, I have decided to write-up my thoughts on the future of digital.

This basically takes the questions I was asked on the day and answers those here.

Q: What are you expecting audience engagement to look like over the next 5 years?

An increasingly demanding and savvy customer:
We have to meet the needs of a customer who more & more have either grown up with digital technologies or adopted them & lives online.  Regardless of channel, location and device the customer now expects a response in the next 3 seconds or they get frustrated, in 5 seconds.... forget it.

Forget about generic messages, they won’t cut it anymore
Sending & providing the same information to everyone is going to have less & less effect, relevancy is key. This obviously creates an issue for those who do not have technology & marketing systems integrated.

Have an acute focus on the customer

Understand each touch-point with your prospective or returning customer and then do everything within your power to minimise their frustrations and maximise their delight. Your website, mobile app, kiosk and should be optimised continually to make them better… if you don’t, your competitors will!

In the future this will all be...

Ever wondered what is going to happen in the next few years or beyond that? Well, with my digital crystal ball I’ve come up with a thought or two on where things are headed.

1. The future is going to contain more technology.
It’s going to be faster in its processing (and therefore seemingly more ‘clever’), more usable and even more ubiquitous than it currently is. However (because of this and other factors) it is also going to be more complicated and connected, meaning that even the word we live in now will seem like a pre-industrial medieval state in just a decade or two.
From clothing embedded with NFC chips costing only a few pence that tell you they’ve been at the bottom of the washing basket for over a week, all the way through to comparison websites that automatically compare the information from that telematics insurance box now built into your hybrid electric car.

2. Data is going to be the most valuable currency
We already know that the huge valuations of online services such as Google and Facebook are not just because they have great functionality (such as to link us to our friends & old colleagues) or a great way of finding stuff…  but because they collect, use and continue to build up data on individuals and their habits, preferences, friends and what they had for breakfast. Amplify this fact by an increased population which is online more often via more devices, collecting even more data and you really start to understand how (after water and  perhaps actual currency) data is going to be the most valuable commodity there is.
I’m not suggesting you will always be able to pay for a bottle of water in a street café by giving them your date of birth… but is it that hard to imagine a time when you will be able to use your Starbucks loyalty card to get a free bottle of water in return for signing-up for their new improved reward programme, which just needs to know one piece of information…. Your birthday??

Scotland's new eCommerce focus

Intro: This post is the second in my series on the future of Scottish eCommerce, with the previous post here

Scottish Enterprise has recently pledged on its website:

"to increase focus on the e-commerce opportunity for Scotland and in particular, to focus on international e-commerce awareness, advice and support."

To support this focus and the Scottish Government's commitment to Scotland's Digital Future, it is now running a new programme to raise awareness of the eCommerce opportunities for Scottish companies and to help businesses north of the border to capitalise on digital commerce processes and technologies.

One parts of this programme was event run today labelled 'Effective e-Commerce: Reaching new markets online' and held in The Sheraton Hotel in Edinburgh. I went along to listen, to meet potential prospects, see the types of people attending and listen to the range of presenters giving their insight. The attendees seemed to range from one-man operations who have yet to properly venture into online sales, through to large companies who wanted to understand 'what happens next'... and everyone else in between.

What was clear from today's event was the obvious determination of many of the participants to make the most of the emerging eCommerce opportunities in Scotland. Yes, there was a lot of jargon and TLA's (three letter acronyms) being used at various points, but there was also a lot of useful advice given out, especially in the breakout session I attended in the afternoon.

On the downside though, I'm not convinced that these sorts of mixed-bag events are all that is required to move Scotland into a leading online retail region. What is also needed is other business support such as: eCommerce mentoring, a better skilled workforce and the ability for company eCommerce people to share and learn from each other in a positive environment.

Additional note:
I forgot to mention in this post that all attendees were given a copy of 'E-commerce Get It Right!'
http://www.amazon.co.uk/E-commerce-Get-Right-Strategies-Simplified/dp/0956526209
This has now been added to the company 'library' for future reference.

Predicting the digital future

The eCommerce and online marketing industry is one of constant change and if you don't like that.... too bad! Tools, practices & technology are permanently evolving in the online world so much it can feel like you're walking just to stand still.

So to be of any lengthy use in this industry you do need the acceptance of change, coupled with the acceptance that you can not know everything there is or what will be.

Consequently, when asked to pull together a strategy for a client that looks at the longer term digital vision, it can often be hard to come up with anything too specific without drifting off into SciFi territory.

So when asked to predict the future, you end up stating the obvious trends such as:
- Internet (especially data) usage will continue to grow
- mobile use will increase further as smartphones continue to become more prevalent
- device manufacturers will release further versions of their equipment to try and identify (& profit from) different consumer segments

Perhaps predicting the future isn't what it used to be.

The future is already here

The future of anything we predict will be wrong, as there will always be further intricacies and differences over time that nobody will have foreseen (or else we'd all be driving around in hover cars several years ago and other such stuff). However, that doesn't stop: fiction writers, astrologists, weathermen and bloggers from forecasting what they believe will happen in the future. If you've attended a recent presentation given by me, you will see I regularly use a quote from the popular Science Fiction writer William Gibson, author of the classic novel Neuromancer that first used the term 'cyberspace'. Although he's great at painting a rich vision of the future, my favourite quote of his is:

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet. [source http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/25815.html]

The rapid rate of change in both society and technology (perhaps these two go hand-in?) now means that the future isn’t the far-off sci-fi future we had in 60’s, 70’s and even 1980’s TV programmes…. Technological change means the future is only one step away. And perhaps any notion of cyberspace (AKA the Internet) as a separate place to go to, rather than something that now overlays our reality and connects 2 billion of the World’s citizens, is now outdated. Any future we now predict should really be based on the always-informed inter-connected world of today and an acceptance that the next quantum leap is only a few years, days or even weeks away. But to give equal weight to the second part of Mr Gibson’s quote, the adoption of technology (and indeed social change) is not equal across the globe. Internet access may be almost a basic human right for those of us living in the First World, but we should consider ourselves lucky each time we flick on the switch to our PC, laptop or smartphone. The ‘developed’ world has almost unconstrained access to the web, whereas the information ‘have-nots’ are also most likely the health, food and medicine ‘have-nots’ as well. Perhaps the real science fiction is that we will manage to: feed, clothe and provide equal rights to everyone…..

Peer 2 Peer pressure

I must be getting older, as I now firmly regard myself as a different generation from the teens and twenty-somethings.

So, as I try to make sense of what a connected world fully means to companies and brands... I do try to understand the impact an always-informed and life-streaming culture has on people, but especially those who embrace technology & communications the most, the Millennials.

I guess, as well as building services for monitoring brand sentiment via Twitter we need to build algorithms that detect cyber-bullying via Facebook' and other such useful tools that were previously not needed or even thought of.

It then begs the question about the types of challenges and pressures that a 24/7 connection creates.

The future may be bright, but it also brings with it new issues we have yet to understand, let alone solve!

Real time is not fast enough these days

Some of you may have seen my Tweet from a few weeks ago that said:

First it was about blogging what you've done, then Tweet & 4Sq what you're doing, now its Plancasting what you will be doing... what next?

This is in relation to the evolving change of the social web, from a reporting medium (such as this blog) to a real-time communication system (via Twitter streams) and then potentially onto a way of scheduling what you're going to be doing.

To try this out I've tried 'plancasting', a site where you say where you will be and when you will be there. The aim being that you can coordiate your activity with others. However not everyone is using these tools yet and to a certain extent the jury is still out on whether the future planning of your activity will gain mass adoption.
Also to be frank... it does kind of take the flexibility out of your plans when you've told all your followers (and therefore potentially everyone and also nobody at the same time) when and where you will be. But who knows... it could become the next big thing...

To perhaps quote the Sci-Fi writer William Gibson might be most apt: "The future has arrived, it’s just not evenly distributed yet"