Newcomers to Britain usually notice the pervasiveness of the nation’s class system. This is a country which even has two classes of stamps! The British supermarket chains have long been a battleground of the class struggle, with some offering mainly own-label, discounted products, and others offering mainly own-label, premium-priced products! I can recall an elderly neighbour once asking me which of the several nearby supermarkets I shopped at, and then saying, “I’m so pleased!” when I gave an answer which she thought demonstrated that we were in the same social class.
Now there is news that some of the chains are heading down-market, in order to take advantage of the recession. But how to do this without losing your current market-position image, nor those customers still able and willing to pay premium prices?
Technorati Tags: class system, supermarket chains
The International Herald Tribune carried an article about viral marketing and counter-viral marketing in US Presidential races last week. The attackers and defenders have been at this game for a couple of centuries, only the technologies have changed.
Technorati Tags: viral marketing
One of the key ideas in the marketing of high-tech products is due to Eric von Hippel of the MIT Sloan School, the idea that lead users often anticipate applications of new technologies before the market as a whole, and even before inventors and suppliers. This is because lead users have pressing or important problems for which they seek solutions, and turn to whatever technologies they can find to respond to their problems.
A good example is shown by the history of Information Technology. The company which pioneered business applications of the new computer technology in the early 1950s was not a computer hardware manufacturer nor even an electronic engineering firm, but a lead user, Lyons Tea Shops, a nationwide British chain of tea-and-cake shops. Lyons specified, designed, built, deployed and operated their own computers, under the name of Leo (Lyons Electronic Office). Lyons, through Leo, was also the first to conceive and deploy many of the business applications which we now take for granted, such as automated payroll systems and logistics management systems. One of the leaders in that effort, David Caminer, has recently died at the age of 92. LEO was later part of ICL, itself later purchased by Fujitsu.
This post is intended to honour David Caminer, as a pioneer of automated business decision-making.
Technorati Tags: lead users, Lyons, Leo, automated business decision-making
The growth of alternative trading systems competing with traditional stock markets has been a phenomenon in financial markets over the last decade. The Financial Times has a nice article on the competition in Europe from these new marketplaces, claiming they typically compete on speed, capacity and cost. As it happens, they also compete on anonymity and confidentiality. Some platforms even allow a trader not to decide whether to buy or to sell a stock until the counter-party reveals his or her hand.
But on speed, the results are impressive:
“On Chi-X’s system, a trade can be executed in two milliseconds, compared with about six on the LSE [London Stock Exchange]. The blink of a human eye takes about 200 milliseconds.”