Luxury menswear brand launched its new online store to my spam box today – which was nice. Followers of my previous ‘I’ve been spammed by…’ posts will know that i don’t think ‘luxury’ and spamming go well together and that anyone doing it is not actually building a brand but destroying it instead.

In this case, the email comes from marketing@bosideng.msgfocus.com. Where do I start? Firstly, even though I understand that they need to market themselves, I never actually want to  be told I am being marketed to. It rather spoils the whole ‘engage my sense and emotions with your luxury brand’ bit of marketing. As for  ”msgfocus”, who are they? Is this the agency you are using to spam me? If so, why is their name appearing in the email?  Do they add to your brand proposition?

It turns out MSGFocus are nothing to do with mono sodium glutamate and are indeed an email agency called Adestra Ltd. Nothing luxury about them as far as I could see and certainly nothing luxury about the list they bought.

All of which doesn’t help Bosideng engage with me at all, p lacing them firmly in the in-authentic luxury brand category. And that’s why I’ll be clicking ‘unsubscribe’…

Every now and again, my ignorance is poked by a sharp stick. This email from The Big Word did just that. And not just the fact that only 11.11% of today’s youth speak English as their first language; the 3000 languages expected to become extinct is a terrifying statistic.

Language diversity is incredibly important to culture and social ‘richness’. But learning languages is also a vital component of our future prosperity. In the UK, there is a natural tendency to believe English is the only language we need to get by. Whereas in reality, this is far from the case. Our growth and future prosperity relies on exports (unlike most American businesses whose domestic market is  big enough). And to compete effectively, business people must understand the cultural and linguistic context in which they operate and exchange

Unfortunately in the UK, people have lost sight of this and either don’t learn a language or demand to learn ones like Spanish at the expense of other more valuable languages like German or French. And the consequence is that those businesses for whom exports are important, have a poor supply of  employees with the right language skills. The CBI survey of employers is clear about what languages are important today.

Source: CBI Education and Skills survey 2012. 

For me the most striking exclusion is Portugese, specifically Brazilian Portugese, but what this list does give is a sense of which export markets are important to UK businesses today

So if you have children , do encourage them to learn a foreign language, preferably other than Spanish. They will be more valuable to employers, will contribute  to our future prosperity  and also enrich themselves at the same time.

The spam that really caught my eye today, was entitled “Brazilian Hair”.

“What on earth is that offering”, I thought to myself?

Can I too have hair like a Brazilian? If so, what does that look like? I’ve been to Brazil and the people I saw had as varied a tonsorial range as any multinational population. Or are they selling tresses cut from latin heads? I know there’s still a lot of poverty there but I’d feel uncomfortable about this.  Or is this a humorous, oxymoronic concept designed to get me to click on the link?

In a moment of madness, I took a peak…

It turns out this is a US firm selling wigs and all sorts of hair extensions for women. And amongst their many and varied ‘looks’ is a range  hair extensions that enables the wearer to look like a Brazilian. And much of this is real human hair!

You live and learn. But shame on you for spamming a caucasian, balding european man. That’s not well targeted at all.

“Business model” is important in achieving sustained competitive advantage, is a hugely powerful weapon in the strategic armoury but is often greatly misunderstood.

One of the problems is that the term “Business model” (I’ll say BM from now on) gets confused with Pricing when in reality, the latter is a function of the former. So pricing is a function of BM whereby margin is captured in a certain way, for certain things and at a certain time depending on the BM you employ.

BM is part of the trio of strategic pillars on which a business sits and is therefore hard to change. Imagine trying to change the business model of an insurance company. Such organisations are built on a BM that makes money from collecting money for any given risk from the many and paying out to the few. Which is why such bodies are run by actuaries and underwriters and behave in the way they do. BM forms part of the identity of the organisation, its culture and behaviour, driving prioritisation of investment decisions, capital structures and the work that gets done inside the business.

What this all means is whilst price can be adapted to suit market conditions, business model is much harder to change. And that’s why it can be a source of competitive advantage.

The battle between Amazon and Apple is a great example of this in action.

Amazon is a retailer interested in retailing: books, films, music, now electronics and god knows what in the future. So its BM is all based on profit per product and their rate of sale. This means they prefer to sell volume items at a decent margin. So when they looked at their digital book business, they decided to make the money on the books and cover costs with the Kindle.

Apple on the other hand is an out and out technology manufacturing company. This means they make their money form selling hardware devices and everything else – software, content, apps etc – are important to the consumer but peripheral to the bottom line. So when it comes to digital book readers it has invested in software that enables the 1-pad to become a competitor to the Kindle and promote this to book readers to generate profits. However, it has ensured i-pad compatible books are available (to make  the product valuable) but chooses to only recover costs on i-tunes, mimicking its strategy for the ipod.

The fascinating battle playing out in the digital book market at the moment involves two behemoths with two completely different business models. So who’ll win in this battle? The customer essentially has a choice between a lower cost task specific device (Kindle) with higher consumption costs or a more expensive multi-application device (i-pad) with lower consumption costs. I suspect  both will carve out market positions and thrive but there’s won’t be room for many competitors. Unless someone comes up with a completely different business model. Time will tell.

And then the offer. 15,000 free minutes to landlines, 3 months trial, no obligation. Wow, John, what a benevolent man you are. And Spa Telecoms sounds so…relaxing, I feel like a new man already.

Free was a good word but there was an asterisk next to it. I looked below to see what the asterisk meant: “subject to conditions’. Ooh, I wonder what they are? Whilst there, I see there’s a two asterisk condition “Depending on location”. Can’t wait to get to that point.

And after the three months, I can leave without penalty. Oh bother, another asterisk (the single one).  Those pesky conditions again.

“What have you got to lose” he concludes.

He goes on to list a lovely list of benefits. John spells minutes ‘minites’ which is nice. Some people can’t spell, John, I understand. But why would I give my phone business to someone who can’t be bothered to check their copy? Perhaps they don’t check other things like if  your phone is working.

The best bit is his legal disclaimer at the bottom:

CONFIDENTIALITY: This email and any attachments are without prejudice, confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the named recipient, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to another person, use it for any purpose, or store or copy the information in any medium. The opinions expressed are those of the individual and not the company. Internet communications are not secure and therefore the company does not accept legal responsibility for the contents of this message. Spa Telecoms Ltd is a limited company registered in England and Wales under company number 6891303 registered address is 1-2 Legge Lane, The Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham, B1 3LD

Oh dear, have I breached your confidentiality John? Oops. Sorry.

(Read the full mailer here) Spa Telecoms – Give Us a Go I won’t but perhaps you may.

PS: If this is the same John Shuker who holds the club record playing for Oxford United, I think you’re in the wrong job.

The highlights were Zoopa and Sccopshot, both of whom had great tales about the ways in which organisation had used their crowd-sourcing services, the former using creatives and the latter, photographers. And alongside them were Microsoft and a digital agency telling equally wonderful stories.

Except I didn’t hear one presenter talk about the commercial value of crowd-sourcing in hard, monetary terms. No one mentioned P&G ‘s long-standing strategic aims for the way they do R&D and no-one talked about the value they accrue from this, I’m guessing because neither they nor an agency would or could profit from P&G’s strategy.

Which was shame really as there is clearly a big conceptual idea behind crowd-sourcing but perhaps it doesn’t translate into an enduring commercial business model for external companies?

Or will it?

• My Blackberry crashes regularly so I have to frequently reboot it by removing the battery, a 5 minute procedure
• The keyboard often doesn’t work so I can’t actually use it like a phone and actually answer a call
• Their batteries have got worse and worse over the years and now seem to need recharging more regularly
• I hate Facebook automatically synchronising with my work calendar so it fills up with the birthdays of people I haven’t seen since 1969 who asked to be my friend five years ago

I have also been told that I-Phone’s have always synchronised with PC’s since launch whilst Blackberry’s could only do so late in 2011, and even now, still can’t do this.

PS: My Blackberry collapsed on Sunday, weighed down as it was with the entertainment software that stops me using the device for what it used to be  truly  great at: a work device. So I called, O2 my provider, and they sent me a replacement device on Monday morning. So far so good. Except the device they sent me stopped working today because the battery doesn’t work. That’s three fatal problems with my device in six months. No wonder they’re going out of business…

In 2008, HM Treasury commissioned some research in order to understand the growth challenges facing UK based SME’s. Interestingly, they did so by running a comparative study against equivalent US firms.

It’s a long 10o page report  but there are some fascinating insights. For instance, they found that less than 10% of SME’s are growth orientated, the vast majority happy with steady state performance especially those in retail and catering type businesses. Not surprising perhaps but it reveals how few firms there are on which the US and UK can depend on for growth. In the UK  only 5.8% of SME’s were growth orientated. Perhaps Mrs Thatcher was right, we are just a nation of shopkeepers…?

What was interesting was business owners’ experience of growth. Despite their efforts at planning, many owners were surprised by “episodic and irregular” growth spurts which didn’t meet their high growth expectations. And here’s where the US:UK comparison was interesting: 61% of US firms achieved their growth objectives whilst only 23% of UK firms did.

I haven’t heard much about what the Government are doing to stimulate this vital part of the business sector . But despite growth businesses being a small proportion of all SME’s, even 5.8% represent a large number of businesses. But what distinguishes them from their North American counterparts is strategy planning: when it comes to competitive strategy, the US firms are more likely to have a strategy and plan about customer growth than UK firms.

Is this why UK firms don’t achieve their growth plans? Is it possible what the UK economic recovery needs is businesses with better strategy?

I predicted Blackberry’s demise about four years ago when my fifteen year old daughter asked for one. The logic was pretty simple: if  my work-related device that helped me be productive in small snippets of time was appealing to a schoolgirl, then something would have to give. And I suspected I was going to be the loser.

Now I loved (past tense) my Blackberry then because everything it did was to help me work. Email, phone and calender synched to my PC, simple document reader, natural keyboard, no distractions.

But then RIM had a bright idea encouraged by greedy shareholders no doubt: let’s pursue the consumer market and turn it into an entertainment device. So they employed software and hardware engineers who understood teenagers and leisure uses of a phone and, with BBM as the mainstay feature started marketing to them instead.

I wondered at the time what would happen to all those great engineers who understood business users and who worked continuously on developing a work-orientated device for them. Because that is where Blackberry’s real value was. But I guess they either got moved away or resources became a lot tighter so RIM took their eye off the work ball to dream instead of a large mass entertainment market.

I know this as about five years ago I got a Macbook. At the time it seemed odd that there was no Blackberry desktop manager for Mac’s so I couldn’t synchronise. And the OS version only came out in 2011 and to this day doens’t work with Entourage. Why not? If I was RIM, I had the opportunity to appeal to both PC and Mac business users especially as Apple didn’t have a phone back then.

But they took the eye off their core market, invested in a larger entertainment led one which they couldn’t ultimately defend against Apple. And because their device now didn’t perform so well for business users (cluttered as it was with games, facebook, music, video) their core customers also defected, unhappy also with the service: remember their global outage problems in 2011?.

This weekend my Blackberry software or hardware failed for the second time this year leaving me without a device on which I depend very heavily. I wonder if this and their server problems last year are indications of a business which simply lost sight of its core market position and in doing so had destroyed its core business. This chart speaks volumes:

For me, I wonder how long I’ll put up with this. But there aren’t many alternatives. I-phones have their fair share of troubles and I don’t want all their functionality. So I’m waiting  for the next great work device  to come along so I can finally ditch this once great brand.

From: Jesus Christ <Jesus@jesuschrist.com>
Date: 15 November 2012 11:34:56 GMT
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: Jesus Christ is only the way. Not Church Not Religion!

The text of this email was vile and antisemitic so I haven’t reprinted it. It was filled with hate and bile and didn’t resemble anything a normal Christian would believe in.  So it is very sad to think some ghastly zealot owns the domain name jesuschrist.com rather than someone who better represents christian values. But then again, they wouldn’t try and spam me if they did.

PS: I’d love to hear more stories about bizarre spam like this – do email me spam@whereyoustand.co.uk