Barcelona's Victory Is Good Business

We English are expected to support English clubs in Europe but I don't much like the English Premiership set-up so I prefer to support a team I do admire like Barcelona.

Compare and Contrast. Man Utd, like all English clubs, embraced the free market and in their case ended up owned by an American company who saddled them with £700 million in debt. Barcelona are owned by their 113,000 members who elect their Board and President. They even turned down a £20 million sponsorship of their shirts in favour of promoting UNICEF. Football clubs started as teams with fans- Barcelona have stayed that way and still manage to be more financially successful than Man Utd.

There is a lesson. Don't underestimate co-operatives as a way to run a business- John Lewis, The Co-Op Bank and the Phone Co-Op all do very well, as do many of the trusts that run arts organisations. The danger of the more common business model is that shareholders come before customers and employees. The result is bigger and more remote (geographically and emotioanlly) companies.

Giving power to the people who are the company- the employees or the customers- ensures that the business doesn't forget why it was created in the first place.

Brand or Category?

My first manager job was for a John Menzies bookshop. My first act as manager was to change the categories of paperbacks from by publisher (designed to help the staff and suppliers) to by subject (to help the customers). It's not always so easy though. Many customers shop by brand and want to see all Nike products, say, grouped together rather than spread between various categories.
Marks & Spencer are an interesting example of a shop that seems unsure of which they want to do. In my local, you can shop for Autograph or PerUna clothing by brand but find other stock grouped by type. Except that lingerie comes under not Autograph or PerUna but lingerie. It's the same in the food section. Unlike Tesco or Sainsbury who mix their Taste The Difference in with the standard and Value products in the appropriate category, Marks put similar meals under categories in some cases and under 'brands' like 'Pub Grub' (or whatever it's called) in others. Confused? You will be if you shop at Marks.
It's easier with an online shop because you can do both- as we do at Your Life Your Style, where for example you can click on Glass by Jo Downs and Handmade In UK.
A bricks and mortar store must observe its customers' behaviour and ask them their preferred way of shopping.

No News Is Bad News

My local paper is the best in the country. The Hampshire Chronicle is over 200 years old but still offers news in depth, considered opinion on relevant issues as well as shining light into dark corners of local politics. TV and radio news is shallow and spineless by comparison.

Sadly the internet is threatening the survival of local newspapers in two ways: firstly by diverting advertising from them, secondly by taking news from them and providing it for free. I know it's not necessarily the end of the world if newspapers die out, you can't fight progress, etc etc... except there is no sign that advertising on the internet alone will ever be able to pay for the resources needed to produce local news of the same quality as The Chronicle and other newspapers which have paying readers. As things stand, if local newspapers disappear, so will the online news.

The internet has been around for a tenth of the time of the Hampshire Chronicle and there are still no clear business models for many of its activities. Yet it is wreaking havoc across a range of industries from the music business to retail shops to the newspaper industry .

The web is useful for updated information and for archives but, if we value our local community and democracy, we must keep buying our local paper until we're sure the internet can really sustain something as good.

Friendly Service Is Not Friendship

Because we are all ‘people’ these days, we too easily forget that they are customers and we are there to serve them. I think a lot of confusion has arisen from the way customer relationships are much more informal than in the past. Just because customers don't expect the kind of subservience and obsequiousness that characterised the old days, we in the service industries mustn't forget that we are still here to serve.

We should be friendly to customers but that doesn't make them our friends. We should be interested in the customer but the customer doesn't have to be interested in us. We have to listen to them, they don't have to listen to us.

Because these days the social skills we use in the service industry mimic those we use in our personal relationships, it is more difficult to remember that we are actually meant to be working.