Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: society

  • Downward trends and demographics mark the end of consumerism

    Downward trends and demographics mark the end of consumerism

    One of the features of the late Twentieth Century economy was how consumer spending came to dominate the economy – as manufacturing moved offshore, mines closed down and agriculture became largely automated, many developed nations’ growth came from retail spending.

    Today’s release of retail spending figures by the Australian Bureau of statistics shows how that economic model too has come to an end. A post on the Macrobusiness blog illustrates the steady, structural decline of retail spending in Australia.

    ScreenHunter_10 Aug. 05 11.36

    Since 2000, the rate of growth has been declining, only low interest rate policies over the last two years has kept retail sales at a steady level.

    Those businesses whose business models are built on the assumption of high growth rates have a big problem – its no coincidence it’s the department and clothing stores are among the loudest complainers about taxes, labour costs and rents as they see their sales and profits shrinking.

    Basically the Twentieth Century era of consumption has come to an end as households have maxed out their credit cards. Now that many of those households are now older, they simply don’t need to spend as much anyway.

    With the demographic, economic and cultural changes now happening in society it’s a bad time to be planning on massive expansions in household spending and debt as we say in most western countries from the 1960s onward.

    It’s time to think different, and be a lot smarter about getting consumers to buy your products. The era of the 72-month interest free deal is over.

    Similar posts:

  • What happens when the power goes out?

    What happens when the power goes out?

    Cisco gave a media and analyst briefing earlier today on the Internet of everything looking at how various technologies can help with tasks ranging from reducing traffic accidents to improving productivity which I’ll write up later.

    One of the analyst’s questions though is worth pondering – “what happens when the power goes out?”

    For most of the industrial processes discussed by Cisco and the panellists, this would be a hassle but most of the systems would, or should, be designed to fall back to a default position should the power fail.

    On a much bigger scale though this is something we don’t really think through.

    In modern Western societyour affluent lifestyle is based upon complex supply chains that get the food to our supermarkets, fuel to our petrol pumps, water to our taps and electricity to our homes.

    Those chains are far more fragile than we think and few of us give any thought to how we’d survive if the power was off for more than a few hours or if the shop didn’t have any milk and bread for days.

    It’s one of the fascinating thing with the end of the world movies. When the meteorite hits or aliens take over then our power and food supplies probably have only 72 hours before they dry up.

    After that, you’ve probably got more to worry about your neighbours trying to steal your hoard than being ripped to pieces by zombies.

    Most of us probably wouldn’t cope without the safe, comfortable certainties which we’ve become used to.

    One thing is for sure — if the power does fail, then most of us will have more to worry about than whether our smartphones are working or whether our geolocating, internet connected fridge is tweeting our wine consumption.

    Similar posts:

  • Facebook as the family newsletter

    Facebook as the family newsletter

    This week’s Royal birth was a curious mix of the old and modern – a cringing fawning by the media over the family and baby which wouldn’t have been out of place of place in a black and white 1950s newsreel  coupled with a modern frenzy on social media.

    In the social media world, the Washington Post reports there were almost one million mentions of the royal birth on Facebook in the hour following the news. It’s an interesting reflection of how communications have evolved.

    Where once we shared news of life events by letter, then telegraph and later the phone; we now broadcast our own news over social media services, particularly Facebook.

    Increasingly for families, Facebook has been the main way people keep in touch with their more distant friends and relatives. Your cousin in Brazil, aunty in Germany or former workmate in Thailand can all keep up with the news in your life through social networks.

    The Royal family itself is an example of this, having set up their own Facebook page for the new arrival and it shows of how ‘weak ties’ are strengthened by the social media connections.

    Another aspect of social media is the ability to filter out noise. If you’re like me, the royal baby is about as interesting as origami classes but  I was spared most of the hype by not looking at broadcast media and sticking to my online services where it was just another story.

    While being able to filter out what you consider ‘noise’ risks creating écho chambers’ it also means the online channels are becoming more useful for both relevant news and family events.

    That’s an important change in personal communications we need to consider. We also have to remember those baby photos we post to Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest are now licensed to those services as well.

    One of the great challenges for this decade is balancing the privacy and security aspects of these new communications channels with the usefulness of the services.

    In the meantime though they are a great substitute for a family newsletter.

    Image courtesy of Hortongrou through sxc.hu

    Similar posts:

  • Dicing up the mobile web

    Dicing up the mobile web

    Last week we had a series of reports on the changing web from Cisco, IBM and Ericsson along with Mary Meeker’s annual State Of The Internet presentation.

    One thing all the reports agreed on was there is going to be a lot more data pushed around the net and the composition is changing as business and home users adapt to smartphones and tablet computers.

    Cisco’s Visual Networking Index forecast online traffic would triple by 2017 while Ericsson’s Mobility Report predicts mobile internet traffic will grow twelve times by 2018.

    What’s notable in those predictions is the amounts and types of data the different devices use. Cisco breaks down monthly traffic by device;

    • Smartphones 0.6 GB
    • Tablet computers 2.7 GB
    • Laptops and PCs 18.6 GB

    In one way this isn’t surprising as the devices have differing uses and their form factors make it harder to consume more data. Cisco also points out that data consumption also varies with processor power. As PCs are the most powerful devices, it makes sense they would chew through more information.

    Ericsson breaks down data use by application as well as device and that clearly shows the different ways we’re using these devices.

    internet data traffic by mobile device

    Notable in the graph is how file sharing is big on PCs but not on tablets or smartphones while email and social networking take up a bigger chunk of cellphone usage.

    What’s also interesting in Ericsson’s predictions is how data traffic evolves. It’s notable that video is forecast to be the biggest driver of growth.

    ericsson-by-data-traffic

    Both Ericsson’s and Cisco’s predictions tie into Mary Meeker’s State Of The Internet presentation at the D11 Conference last week.

    It’s worth watching Meeker’s presentation just for the way she packs over eighty slides into twenty minutes with a lot of information on how the economy is changing as the internet matures.

    What all of these reports are telling us is that our society and economy are changing as these technologies mature. The business opportunities – and risks – are huge and there isn’t any industry that’s immune to these changes.

    Similar posts:

  • Rethinking the middle class

    Rethinking the middle class

    Technologist Jaron Lanier says the internet has destroyed the middle classes.

    He’s probably right, a similar process that put a class of mill workers out of a job in the Eighteenth Century is at work across many industries today.

    Those loom workers in 18th Century Nottingham were the middle class of the day – wages were good and work was plentiful. Then technology took their jobs.

    Modern technology has taken the global economy through three waves of structural change over the past thirty years, the first wave was manufacturing moving from the first world to emerging economies as global logistic chains became more efficient.

    The second wave, which we’re midway through at the moment, is moving service industry jobs and middleman roles onto the net which destroys the basis of many local businesses.

    Many local service businesses thrived because they were the only print shop, secretarial service or lawyer in their town or suburb. The net has destroyed that model of scarcity.

    The creative classes – people like writers, photographers and musicians – are suffering from the samee changed economics of scarcity.

    Until now, occupations like manual trades such a builders, truckdrivers and plumbers were thought to be immune from the changes that are affecting many service industries.

    The third wave of change lead by robotics and automation will hurt many of those fields that were assumed to be immune to technological forces.

    One good example are Australia’s legendary $200,000 mining truck drivers. Almost all their jobs will be automated by the end of the decade. The days of of relatively unskilled workers making huge sums in the mines has almost certainly come to an end.

    So where will the jobs come from to replace those occupations we are losing? Finance writer John Mauldin believes the jobs will come, we just can’t see them right now.

    He’s almost certainly right – to the displaced loom worker or stagecoach driver it would have been difficult to see where the next wave of jobs would come from, but they did.

    But maybe we also have to change the definition of what is middle class and accept the late 20th Century idea of a plasma TV in every room of a six bedroom, dual car garage house in the suburbs was an historical aberration.

    Just like the loom weavers of the 18th Century, it could well be the middle class incomes of the post World War II west were a passing phase.

    If so, businesses and politicians who cater to the whims and the prejudices of the late Twentieth Century middle classes will find they have to change their message.

    Similar posts: