Power to the fans

Supporters’ trusts are all the rage. A mixture of anger, frustration and fear is leading fans to band together in an attempt to influence the way their football clubs are run. The Americans at Liverpool and Manchester United are the most noted villains but there are others at such as Newcastle, Cardiff and Portsmouth. There will be plenty more trusts springing up, too. Membership is small as yet - except for the 38,000 recruited by Manchester United Supporters Trust – but reputedly growing fast. These should be ideal prospects for printwear since they want to generate revenue, announce their allegiance and shout their disapproval, all of which printwear is very good at.

Going for a Chinese

More and more schools are offering mandarin as a language option, which should give the pupils a skill valued in the printwear industry. Unfortunately, we’re a day late and a dollar short.  There are an estimated 10 million English speakers in China, but last year fewer than 3,500 students sat GCSE mandarin. At the same time, 100,000 Americans are studying the language.

I could have told you that…

Happiness is what we all want and if proof were needed bookshops have big sections dedicated to its pursuit and achievement. Reading more than a page of any of them is next to impossible without running screaming from the shop, but  they (and a long term study by Harvard University) throw up the fact that the key to happiness is the healthiness of our personal relationships. This translates into a business context too. All the best business people I have met seem intuitively to understand this and work hard at developing and fostering those personal relationships. Even in our wired world people still buy from people.

On the buses

More and more of us are travelling on buses: Stagecoach reports revenues up 9% in100 towns. This is partly due to the recession but mainly because people find them fast, convenient, cheap and reasonably reliable – at least in major cities. More than that, the demographic of urban bus passengers is not as down-market as you might think nor so skewed by free passes for pensioners. It is therefore an ideal opportunity for market research – done sitting down in warm, dry conditions, too. Some years ago I heard of a guy researching and product testing a new board game on London buses and he successfully sold it to a major manufacturer. I’m surprised the bus companies haven’t harnessed this. It would also be a highly cost-effective way to show off new products or give out product samples and vouchers, just before customers hit the shops. Good for the bus companies, too.

Fluent Brummie…

…And indeed Scouse, Geordie, Glaswegian and Yorkshire. Researchers at Lancaster University have found that we are, as a nation, increasingly proud of our local accents. Quite right, too: the new accent every 30 miles is part of the colour of Britain. This has been reflected in advertising from time to time and you see tea towels telling you, for instance, how to speak Scouse but it’s very rarely featured on printwear. Surely this is a missed opportunity. Much of printwear is about belonging and your accent is part of that belonging. ‘Appen where there’s dialect, there’s brass.

The sweet taste of failure

Cadbury’s have been fighting off a takeover from Kraft for months to no avail. This not only costs a multi-million pile in advisors’ fees but it takes everybody’s eye off the ball. It’s a bit late now, but wouldn’t it have made such sense for the product’s packaging to recommend enthusiasts of their chocolate – of which there are millions – to buy stock in the company and so share the success of a company whose product they like? Having a lot of small shareholders tends to make a business more secure against takeover bids, especially when those shareholders are fans…

Back to basics

I see that a mobile phone has been launched which is bigger than normal, which doesn’t take photographs or download video and which has big buttons, hence its name the Big Button phone. It is designed for those people who just want a phone that enables them to stay in touch with friends, family and business contacts.

Would you credit it?

I read that Credit Suisse bankers’ bonuses are to be cut substantially and applaud the fact that one of the big players has shown that they ‘get it’. The announcement referred to their ‘400 managing directors in London’. Pardon me? 400? Presumably they’ve got a load more stashed away in Zurich and New York as well. Doing what?

Insurance against next time

Barack Obama and some other senior political figures worldwide are proposing to create a bail-out fund so that a repeat of the banking crisis lands back in the bankers laps. Good idea, no? After all, insurance against future risks is a good thing. One little problem: where do they propose to stash the cash and in what physical form? Current estimates of the cost of the bail-out in America alone run to $90 billion, so for a worldwide figure you can probably double that and add on the number you first thought of. Meanwhile, the value of gold in Fort Knox stands at some $110 billion. Back to the drawing board, chaps.

Why did you give me the business?

I’ve been told the answer to this one, unprompted, a few times, but I’ve never asked it. To my ear it sounds uncomfortably like an encouragement to the client to review their decision. Perhaps I’m wrong. Dynshaw Italia, the eBookers entrepreneur, says that if you don’t know what is making you succeed, you can’t replicate it. I’ve had suppliers ask me why they didn’t get the nod, but, again, nobody ever asked why they did get the job. Me, I’m going to start asking.

World Cup effect

It is being suggested that the World Cup will define more than just our football team. The general election’s timing may be held off until the last minute to capitalise on so-called World Cup fever. Victory for our boys would create a buzz that would, it’s said, end the recession. (The opposite also applies, unfortunately).

Half a job is better than no bread

Unemployment has somewhat surprisingly fallen as people take part-time jobs. I have often wondered why this isn’t more common. Two part-time jobs can equal one full-time job. Smaller businesses often need specialist skills but can’t afford them and, just as likely, don’t need a full-time employee. A skilled marketing manager (say), working two and a half days a week for each of two businesses would be good news all round. The businesses would get the right amount of the right skills and the employee would have to be desperately unlucky or truly inept to lose both jobs together.

Take one tablet

Apple’s new tablet computer, the I-pad has been launched and its impact assessed. Everybody will by now have forgotten the pre-launch marketing. That would be easy because strictly speaking there wasn’t any. Applying absolute secrecy to new products is the Apple style (even the product name wasn’t leaked) and it has worked again: newspapers, magazines and websites - not to mention any place where two or more techno-heads meet – were awash with speculation and rumour about its capabilities, features and presumed wizardry. As Dolly Parton says “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap” and I suspect Apple will have spent a small fortune doing so little marketing.

A triumph of hope

Let’s hear it for a British success story. Triumph Motorcycles, who were rescued from receivership in the '80s, have announced that their UK sales in 2009 topped those of Kawasaki, putting them fourth behind the Japanese big three. Their sales rose by 26% – not bad in a recession. A similar performance next year could see them brand leader. Most of their product goes to export, notably to the States, where they have overtaken BMW.

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