With two weeks to go before the British general election, the media seems to have gone politically bonkers. You can’t turn a page or switch on the TV without an immediate update on the upcoming election. Marketers are not exempt from all this either.
I started as a professor in the late 90s. I was young, inexperienced and terrified of the MBAs I was now paid to teach. So when the dotcom revolution started, I watched as my best students at London Business School rejected enormous starting salaries from McKinsey and Deutsche Bank in favour of working for start-ups I had never heard of.
When Jill Little, merchandise and marketing director at John Lewis, recently announced that the retailer was to introduce a value range, it was widely seen as a smart move. The homeware products line has been specifically designed to help John Lewis defend its ‘Never knowingly undersold’ slogan against supermarkets that have moved into its territory.
The most recent case study came last December, when it emerged that Google would launch a service in the UK allowing real-estate agents to list their properties for free. The news came as a shock to Rightmove, the leading online real-estate service in the UK. Yet, as usual, the executives in charge were openly dismissive of the threat.
Nokia retains a massive share of the global mobile phone market, but cracks are beginning to appear in its once-impenetrable leadership.
