Are you typical?

I saw this linked to someone's profile on Skype. Thought you'd like it. Apologies if you have seen it before.

What does competition mean?

My definition of competition:

When someone else elbows their way into your territory and takes your clients away from you.

In my case it could mean a company who starts offering what we do, same fee band and process. So, should we feel threatened?

No.

Because the more people/agencies do what we do the more easily we can differentiate ourselves and the more mainstream our approach becomes. The more mainstream our approach becomes, the more clients there will be to share among us. So why do I feel concerned each time someone sends me a link to companies doing similar things to us?

You all know about our ethnography app, right? Watch this and this.

A couple of weeks ago a colleague sent me this link. And yesterday I stumbled upon this app. So I made my wife watch both clips for her reaction.

"It's exactly what you're doing... isn't it?"

"Not really. These is for consumers."

"So is your app. And I suppose you just have to accept that more and more people will start doing similar things to you."

Which is a good thing, no? As long as we are ten steps ahead of them it's a wonderful thing.

Funny Intel ad on Pedro Oliveira's blog

I just can't stop laughing at this ad.

And I found it on a rather brilliant blog by a friend called Pedro Oliveira. Here is a great post from the said blog - worth watching the clips too as the first one is mine.

Enjoy!

EasyJet explorations circa 1998

I was allowed to observe all meetings, fly around and read emails.

Was it really 13 years ago?

A Marketing Week journalist called James Curtis (really nice guy by the way) approached me to say that if I was willing to do some ethnographies of EasyJet, he would write it up for his magazine as a running, weekly feature. This was not a paid PR stunt. It was inspired by James himself.

I wasn't particularly busy having been at DDB for a only a few weeks. So I agreed. And had an awful lot of fun doing it. Partly because I was under no client pressure as I knew that James would sex up even the most awful findings. In the end he didn't need to sex anything up. For one key reason: I discovered that the more I enjoy doing an ethnographic exploration the better the outputs. The fascinating subject matter - EasyJet's Marketing team and being allowed to hang out with the marketing director for a whole week - helped too.

Here is the feature.