Guest Post: Reed and Bhs are inevitable collateral damage in today’s omni-channel sales and marketing world

Another guest post from Christopher Moseley, (details below)

Reed and Bhs are inevitable collateral damage in today’s omni-channel sales and marketing world

It’s not hard not to get a little bit nostalgic about the death throes of well-known British High Street brands. Woollies was the first big name in living memory to get killed off in the Great War of the Internet versus the High Street; Austin Reed and Bhs are the very latest casualties.

Philip Green’s soon to face a grilling from a Commons committee, and no doubt the sense of outrage and accusations of asset stripping will heighten the tensions and anger associated with job losses and the of dying British High Street brands. As to Austin Reed, it’s hard to see a well-heeled target figure stepping forward to face similar political brickbats: it just kind of, well, died away.

Asset stripping aside it’s hard to see how tired old brands like Bhs might have survived in a world where choice is a touch screen away. The venerable British High Street, and the myriad shops which struggle to stay solvent within the confines of her bricks and mortar structure, still has a white knight in the form of Mary Portas, but it’s clear that the writing is on the, er, shop window … it reads, ‘Closing Down’.

Twenty or so years ago if I had wanted to buy a set of headphones I would have strolled to my nearest retailers to make my purchase.  In the 2010s, close as I am to my local high street, I can simply go online. It’s the only viable decision – there’s simply a much bigger choice, and greater availability.

And with a smartphone in hand, or a laptop or tablet at my side, I’m able to quickly locate a wealth of information about my desired product before being given a list of potential suppliers – often ranked by reliability and item price.

Why would I ‘go’ bricks and mortar, when with a simple click my goods can be delivered to my house the very next day?

Why break into a bipedal sweat when one can surf?

Omni-channel selling provides consumers with numerous channels through which they can interact with and purchase from retail businesses. There’s all the attendant information about products, the means to interact with technical experts, and a giddy range of devices: smartphones, desktops, notebooks to browse on.

The 24-7 shopping experience

The obvious advantage of Internet shopping is that is that one can shop well after the High Street curfew of 5:30pm. We can all shop to heart’s content, on the couch, in the bath, or in a tent on Ben Nevis. Businesses that can’t cater for the around-the-clock punters face obliteration. Why walk?

The future’s bespoke, more interesting and built for humans

Around 16 years ago, when the first corrosive impact of the Internet was being felt in the High Street, I once tried to stage a media stunt. I proposed a debate between several well-known exponents of retail, pitted against some toughies (clients actually) who worked in e-commerce. If memory serves I’d wanted to co-opt a Selfridges or Harrods window to conduct the debate. It would have been fab I think.

It never happened – I guess the issue wasn’t quite sufficiently in the public eye back in ’00.

It’s a different story today. We’re right in the middle of a bloodbath and it’s hard to see a future for the great British High Street, other than, perhaps, this is an opportunity to return to something rather old-fashioned, something much more traditional.

If there is a future for the High Street, it won’t be a continuation of today’s confection of identikit chain stores, but rather much akin to the boutique butcher, baker and candlestick maker of yesteryear. Throw in some vibrant street markets, some residential housing, and one has something like the world of the Edwardian era.

So, the mantra of the High Street in the 2020s might just be, ‘Let’s party like it’s 1899 …’

Chris Moseley

Head of Public Relations, Merchant Marketing Group

Email. chris@merchantmarketinggroup.com

Tel +44 238022 5478

The future of vacuum cleaners

Dyson seems pretty good in vacuum cleaners and may well have tried this and found it doesn’t work, but then again, sometimes people in an industry can’t see the woods for the trees so who knows, there may be something in this:

Our new pet cat Jess, loves to pick up soft balls with a claw and throw them, and catch them again. Retractable claws are very effective.

Jess the cat

At a smaller scale, velcro uses tiny little hooks to stick together, copying burs from nature.

Suppose you make a tiny little ball that has even tinier little retractable spines or even better, hooks. And suppose you make them by the trillion and make a powder that your vacuum cleaner attachment first sprinkles onto a carpet, then agitates furiously and quickly, and thus gets the hooks to stick to dirt, pull it off the surface and retract (so that the balls don’t stick to the carpet) and then you suck the whole lot into the machine. Since the balls have a certain defined specification, they are easy to separate from the dirt and dust and reuse again straight away. So you get superior cleaning. Some of the balls would be lost each time, and some would get sucked up next time, but overall you’d need to periodically top up the reservoir.

The current approach is to beat the hell out of the carpet fibers with a spinning brush and that works fine, but I think adding the active powder might be better because it gets right in among the dirt and drags it kicking and screaming off the fibers.

So, ball design. Firstly, it doesn’t need to be ball shaped at all, and secondly it doesn’t need spines really, just to be able to rapidly change its shape so it gets some sort of temporary traction on a dirt particle to knock it off. What we need here is any structure that expands and contracts or dramatically changes shape when a force is applied, ideally resonantly. Two or three particles connected by a tether would move back and forwards under an oscillating electrostatic, electrical or magnetic field or even an acoustic wave. There are billions of ways of doing that and some would be cheaper than others to manufacture in large quantity. Chemists are brilliant at designing custom molecules with particular shapes, and biology has done that with zillions of enzymes too. Our balls would be pretty small but more micro-tech than nano-tech or molecular tech.

The vacuum cleaner attachment would thus spray this stuff onto the carpet and start resonating it with an EM field or sound waves. The little particles would wildly thrash around doing their micro-cleaning, yanking dirt free, and then they would be sucked back into the cleaner to be used again. The cleaner head doesn’t even need to have a spinning brush, the only moving parts would be the powder, though having an agitating brush might help get them deeper into the fabric I guess.

 

Smart packaging: Acoustic sterilisation

I should have written this on the ides of March, but hey ho. I was discussing packaging this morning for an IoT event.

Imagine a bacterium sitting on a package on a supermarket shelf is called Julius Caesar. Now imagine Brutus coming along with a particularly sharp knife and stabbing him hundreds of times. That’s my idea, just scaled down a bit.

This started as a slight adaptation of an idea I developed for Dunlop a few years ago to make variable grip tires. (Still waiting for Dunlop to make those, so maybe some other tire company might pick up the idea).

The idea is very simple, to use tiny triangular structures embedded in the surface, and then pull the base of the triangle together, thereby pushing up the tip. My tire idea used electro-active polymers to do the pulling, and sharp carbon composites to do the grip bit, or in this antibacterial case, the sharp knife. Probably for packaging I’d use carbon nanotubes or similar as the sides with which to stab the bacteria, but engineers frequently come up with different nanostructure shapes so I’m pretty agnostic about material and shape. If it ruptures a bacterium, it will be good.

An easier to use alternative for widespread use in packaging would be to ditch the electro-active polymer and associated electronics, and instead to use a tuned acoustic wave to move the blades in and out of the surface. All that is needed to activate them is to put out that frequency of sound through a speaker system in the supermarket or factory. The sound needed would likely be ultrasonic, so it doesn’t irritate all the shoppers, and in any case, nano-structures will generally be associated with high frequencies.

So the packaging would include tiny structures that act as the dagger attached to a particular acoustic mass acting as Brutus, that would move when the appropriate resonant frequency is broadcast.

This technique doesn’t need any nasty chemicals, though it does need the nanostructures and sound and if they aren’t designed right, the nanostructures could be just as harmful. Anyway, that’s the basic idea.

Self-sterilizing surfaces & packaging

Future of cleaning: UV hybrid drone/ambient with presence detection