Grocery shopping Guernsey style

Fed up of buying fruit and veg wrapped in plastic and stored at sub zero temperatures in your local supermarket? Longing for the days of a proper green grocer experience, with wonky veg that tastes great and travelled less than 5 miles from soil to plate? Maybe you should be booking a weekend break in Guernsey next Spring.

Yes, this is a shameless tourism plug for the island, but it's also a great reason to play this short film produced by Spike Productions all about the Guernsey institution that is Hedge Veg.



It also means i can post my favourite hedge veg stall just up the road, clearly this grower recognises the importance of roadside presentation.

Now all you have to do is book your flights and find somewhere to stay on the brand new Visit Guernsey website. Enjoy.

10 observations on my Olympic experience

After being lucky enough to attend three fantastic days of Olympic action, i thought I'd jot down a few observations...

1. The Brand Police really did stop at nothing

How many people honestly know what on earth 'fruit cup no.1' is? And if you do, would you spend £10 on it? (Well, sadly my wife did)

Any one for Fruit Cup No1?

Independent stall holders at Eton Dorney cover up their 'highly contentious' names...

2. We need more wild flower meadows everywhere.

Wild flower meadow at the velodrome

3. Advertising in an 'Olympic' station is an utter utter waste of money.

LOCOG did a great job with high visibility signage and hundreds of volunteers - especially at Stratford. The result was that everyone knew where they were going and no one even noticed the McDonald's advertising everywhere.

No time or space for McDonald's ads at Stratford Station

Contrast that with Gillette who covered 3 tower blocks on the way to the venue itself - much more effective in gaining standout, and delivering huge impact.

4. The crowds really were fantastic as this wobbly video testifies


5. The military ought to run the airports

I underwent 3 security checks across my three visits, all fast, seamless, pleasant affairs - if only the military could take over airport security when they've finished at the Olympics.

6. The BBC was hit & miss

While their online and mobile offerings go from strength to strength, the prime time presenting and pundit teams leave a lot to be desired. The biggest criticism has to be the lack of expert breadth. If a presenter and pundit know nothing about a sport they would do better to say nothing at all and refer to a report, than engage in outdated, uninformed, pub chat. Two examples...

Gary: Do you think the final day conditions suited Ben Ainslie in the sailing?

Sean (ex hockey player): Well i don't know a thing about sailing but i think....

And even worse, following the Dressage success...

Gaby: So our first gold ever in dressage...

Steve Cram & Chris Boardman: Yeah but home advantage has played a big part for us there, not having to transport the horses to say Beijing, i presume that was a massive advantage.

Now i don't know a huge amount about dressage but then I'm not being paid to talk about it on BBC1. What i do know is that Germany have won the last 7 Olympic Dressage events.The last 7! Half of which were on the other side of the world, so credit where it's due - the Dressage team managed something unprecedented, regardless of the transport arrangements.



7. Empty seats can only be avoided when sponsorship contracts are agreed

Empty seats at the swimming

Alright it wasn't quite as bad as that picture above suggests, we were there very early. But on that particular night, the night of the 100m freestyle final, there were a block of 20 seats left in front of us. Five minutes into the action around 40% were filled by guests of Lloyds Bank (according to their lanyards), the rest were wasted. It's not just Lloyds' fault. Games organisers need to wake up to two key issues. 1. If someone gets something for free, they value it less than someone that paid a tenner, or £95 quid for the same thing. 2.  If a company spends £100m sponsoring a global event, they want value for money, and for them that means (among other things) quantity of tickets. More, more, more, despite the fact that a decent % of those extra tickets that they recieve will be for a morning session that no one wants to attend - especially when gifted them for free.

A further caveat to that, is that the IOC 'family' receive 50% more tickets than sponsors (12% versus 8%) which must amount to well over 1 million tickets - is that really necessary?


8. Coke & BP experiences looked impressive, albeit i decided not to queue for 45 minutes to experience them

BP park pavilion

Coke's move to the beat pavillion

9. The quality of merchandise was a bit of a let down, but that didn't stop the longest queue in the park forming.


10. The Orbit looks best at night time, when you can't really see it.

I know the LOCOG budget didn't put it there, and i do think the park needs the height of such a tower, it's just a shame that the Orbit looks like such a mess and by all accounts, doesn't provide a great view when you're up there due to the fully enclosed nature of the public areas.

The public viewing deck and access points are all you notice when you look at this structure, compared to say the Eiffel tower where they are neatly hidden away. Why has one of the World's most successful artists had to cave in to Health & Safety? If Danny got away with it regarding those sheep, surely Anish could have managed it for a structure that could be there for decades to come?

Saturday night: an Olympic sized shop window

Last Saturday night was a rather good one for me, for 80,000 people in Stratford and for a gazillion people watching on TV all over the country.

Jess and Greg were great and Mo Farah's race was the greatest bit of live sport I've ever watched. Hairs on the back of your neck don't even come close to the feeling everyone had up and down the country when he hit the front still with 400m to go.

Everyday we've seen wall to wall coverage of athletes achieving unimaginable feats of athleticism or - as they put it - letting their team and their country down under the shear weight of expectation that comes with 4 years of training for one single first round heat.

Having watched the first week's events, it turns out we're pretty handy at a lot of sports that are still effectively minority activities nationwide and in the large part ignored by school curriculums.

But it's not just the talent of our athletes that's impressive, it's the way they conduct themselves. They're humble. When was the last time that word appeared in a sentence alongside the name of a premiership footballer? Many of these athletes are supported by lottery funding, some have other jobs and all are making the ultimate sacrifice over four long years for their moment to shine.

This two weeks is the ultimate shop window for these sports. The beauty of the Olympics is that it's greater than the sum of it's parts. Minority sports will go back to being minority sports by October and only the most impressive of gold medal hauls will live on in the memory. So it feels all the more important to take advantage of this window of opportunity and encourage adults as well as kids to try something new. Yesterday's Times newspaper carried a small column on trying cycling, boxing, volleyball and hockey. Each obviously have their own organisations and 'give it a go' programs and while that's right for those that really seek it out, it doesn't feel like it's made easy enough for the majority of people.

Here's what i'd do...

1. Find our answer to 'Jamie Oliver' to become a highly vocal sporting figurehead in lobbying the government - backed by the media - over broader (and more competitive) sporting opportunities in schools. And get a debate happening this year.
2. Post games, run an Olympic led comms push around getting into these sports, utilising the current 2012 website that everyone is familiar with to maximise enquiries before disseminating to individual sporting bodies
3. Harness the spirit of volunteering and club ethos to provide opportunities for activity all over the country
4. Pressure official sponsors into investing in equipment to aid local clubs as part of the legacy
5. Focus on kids but don't exclude adults, if recent statistics are anything to go by, they're almost in greater need of exercise and making it fun is more likely to make participation happen 
6. And finally, do it quickly. It feels like we have until the end of the Paralympics before the euphoria starts to recede and our new found love of volleyball goes into hibernation for another 4 years

School trip to...

You're on a school trip in the capital. It's an early start, well 9am, on Shaftesbury Avenue. Where to first? McDonalds of course for a hearty breakfast. What would Jamie say....

A school party queue for McDonalds at 9am on Friday morning

"ecommerce will be the saviour of the High Street"

I attended this debate last week at Portcullis House run by The Debating Group. The evening pitched Dominic Allon of Google and Richard Eyre of the IAB against Matt Stringer, MD at Carphone Warehouse and Paul Martin, MD at Planet retail. The former pair arguing for the motion against the latter.

Clearly the answer isn’t quite so black and white and as you'd expect, the debate took the well-trodden path of how e-commerce can aid the high street through multichannel communications and used recent Christmas sales growth as an example of reinvigorating the retail sector. This was countered with cold hard facts of shop closures, redundancies and empty units up and down the country, 1 in 7 according to Mr Stringer, not to mention the fact that Amazon haven’t rushed into 'bricks and mortar' in order to offer a multichannel service.

Aside from the usual rhetoric, a few interesting points did come out of this session.

• Understanding the customer - e-commerce has given more power to the shopper and with more choice and information comes a more efficient, more competitive, polished service, except that’s the problem – with the high street, it doesn’t. The High street hasn’t evolved, it hasn’t played to its strengths and now, in an open market, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that a stronger competitor has come along with a better service. Being online doesn’t equal success, just look at MySpace. Amazon doesn't just have lower overheads, it's an extremely well run business that understands what it's customer wants and has built a customer experience and product offering accordingly, and that's what is giving it the edge. Ten years ago we were having this same conversation, except it was Tesco that was 'killing local businesses'. This current battle will come down to consumer choice, if the High Street continues to fail in adding value to it's offering and instead enter a pricing war it will only serve to encourage consumers to opt for the short term price benefit and that's a battle that bricks and mortar stores will never be able to win.

• What do we mean by the High Street? Big cities, smaller cities, market towns and villages all have them, but they tend to look very different and serve very different purposes. In a new digital age with no post offices and fewer and fewer local pubs, maybe we need to consider what the broader role of the High Street ought to be. You could argue that the web, and to a certain extent e-commerce has actually levelled the playing field for those much smaller businesses. A local craftsman doesn’t just have to rely on a classified ad in the local paper and passing trade, he can cost effectively target the whole country without needing to master coding and complex e-commerce systems in the process. 

• The mobile opportunity - I was surprised at how little discussion there was about mobile in all of this. Even Facebook (in its recent S-1 report) has flagged the fact that it needs to better adapt to the on-going trend to access the web through hand held devices. For me, it represents a real opportunity for retail. Yes, people can compare there and then in store but it also allows retailers to target passing trade, provide a real personalised experience in store and improve the face to face customer service through leveraging a broader support network (such as Twelpforce at Best Buy).

In reality, it’s only the High Street that can save itself and to do that, businesses need to evolve with the consumer and play to their strengths. Look to the successes and consider what drivers are at play for each of those retailers. When you consider that brits see shopping as a national pastime, its clear that an almost primeval desire is already in place with the audience, what stores have to do is reignite that passion and meet the demands of a new type of information laden, savvy shopper. Of course people want a competitive price and convenience, but they also want to talk to someone, to hold something, touch it, feel it, a physical and sensory experience that can be shared, that's great fun and that gets them wanting more - all the High Street has to do is supply it.

Future trends: the 2015 consumer

I went to a ‘big conversation’ hosted by Mintel last week that used four macro trends to forecast how the world could be working in 2015 and the subsequent impact that could have for people, industry and brands.

It mixed cold hard data and market experience to project what we can expect to see in future years and it threw up some interesting points providing real food for thought, particularly around how products and brands need to evolve and adapt to the new tastes and customs of a global audience.

For me the most interesting point came with the intersection of three trends, all of which are pretty self-explanatory, well the first two at least, the third refers to the older generation, their increased number, spending power and youthful attitude to life.

1.     East meets West

2.     Access everywhere

3.     Old Gold

It was a reoccurring theme around the notion of a healthy lifestyle along with the importance of looking after yourself and others that I found interesting – here’s a top line on the three trends and how their convergence could provide significant opportunities for some brands.

1.     East meets West. The growth of the East is well documented but the size and speed of this growth really is something to behold…

·       90% increase in India’s GDP over the next four years

·       More 1m+ populated cities in China than the US and Canada

·       China responsible for 25% of luxury goods sales across the globe in 2011

·       Migration to cities (particularly in China and India) will result in 70% of world population living in cities by 2020

It’s fair to assume that the subsequent impact on the cost of living and consumption of everything from food to luxury manufactured goods across the globe will be significant.

2.     Access Everywhere is already well under way, but the innovations around smart phones, location based technology, along with NFC technology removing data transfer barriers, will have a huge effect on how people interact with their surroundings…

·       By 2014, more people will access the web via mobile than desk top machines

·       Attitudes to online security are changing - 30% of teens who have been ‘hacked’ said they don’t think it’s a big deal

·       Personal appliances previewed at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas are now synchronised to social networks and mobile devices

·       People are increasingly prepared to pay more for mobile tailored content

·       1 in 3 men in the U.S. use their mobile to manage their health

Again, health and wellbeing are likely to see significant advances as a result of technology driving “DIY health”. We’ve seen diabetes blood testing apps and Wi-Fi enabled smart scales at CES and the recently launched Nike+ FuelBand is another example of technology driving the personalised health sector.

3.     Finally, Old Gold highlights the growing impact that an ageing population could have and argues that a once ignored consumer group should become a much greater focus for brands over the next five years, especially given their appetite for adventure and receptiveness to new technologies improving their lifestyle.

·       144m more over 55s in the world than today (by 2015)

·       Over 55s will double by 2015 in the UK

·       Intergenerational homes becoming more and more commonplace

·       By 2015, 41% of South Koreans and 45% of Japanese will be aged over 60

·       50% of kindle users are over 50

·       50% of babies born after the year 2000 will live to 100 years old

The numbers above highlight the strain that state services will be under in trying to look after an ageing population. It’s likely that remit will begin to fall to families, not just the state – and that could have implications still further for the long term attitude of governments to the health and wellbeing of its people.

It feels like the opportunity around health and wellbeing over the next 5 years in particular will be significant. And I’m not just talking about importing Tai Chi exercise into the workplace here. I think we’re likely to see a longer term pro-active approach to health and wellbeing that encompasses a much more holistic perspective, facilitated partly by the advances in mobile technologies and personalised health management and partly by the wider social backdrop of healthcare systems under considerable strain. with intergenerational family units caring for each other as opposed to relying on the state, much like we see in the Far East.

Will we end up with a nation of health obsessed hypochondriacs? I don’t think so; I think people will be much more aware of the lifestyle they are leading and that improved education and tangible monitoring techniques will enable people to enjoy a more balanced lifestyle. It will enable people to really question the suitability (be that provenance, health or ethical credentials) of the products and brands on offer to them. All of which could have significant repercussions for brands that are ill prepared, while also serving as a huge competitive advantage for those businesses that have evolved to pre-empt a new breed of consumer.

Leisure time trends across the globe

We've just released the latest edition of Arnold ON, a thought-leadership piece which aims to explore cultural, social and consumer trends directly impacting businesses around the globe. This isssue explores 'leisure' and our growing need to break free, have fun and enjoy life.


The findings are based on an in-depth, global study across the U.K., U.S., Brazil and China which explored how consumers are finding a break from life’s pressures and the role that brands play in that time of leisure.

You can have a read here.