Infographics - do they work for you? Is a video review better?

Infographics is a term recently back in the marketing spotlight used to describe the visual presentation of information, data or knowledge in an easy to comprehend way.

In fact infographics make me think of long gone parents evenings at my children's school where posters of historic events, geography, science etc displayed information, data or knowledge in an easy to comprehend way. Hold on. Does this suggest that the target audiences need pictures to make them look at this stuff, so we have to treat them like children? Early reading books are mainly picture books with captions, but as they progress and grow up children move on to text only books. An interesting infographic on the subject of Content Marketing was so long it set me thinking that traditional bar charts might actually display the data more usefully.

Then what type of person needs the information made pretty anyway? Engineers have traditionally received data in tables or charts, dimensions marked on drawings and descriptions in specification terminology - all delivered in a data sheet. Where the operation benefits from illustration then video is in my mind much more effective.

An interesting observation here is that a class of apparently amateur reviewers has emerged to provide their opinion on the product - for example electronic gadgets for home and office. The manufacturers send them a 'review sample' which they unwrap, set up, test and offer an opinion as to value and effectiveness. In short a fairly independent assessment for minimal expense and probably saves a lot of calls to the support team too! 

How many readers get beyond your headline?

In today's time scarce, content rich environment the headline can be crucial for readers deciding whether to go on and read the article, or skip to the next item.

People in all walks of life and professions have a need to keep themselves well informed and for b-2-b communications this will probably include prospective buyers of the company's product or services, specifiers, installers and stockists. The target audience in other words need to be well informed about the benefits of products and will be bombarded by messages from news feeds, email newsletters, advertising and articles. Often the headline is the filter - read or bin the news item?

Until recently PR managers wrote headlines to catch the eye of editors, who in turn wrote something else to attract the attention of their readers. But with the swing to self publication, the press office now needs to write headlines to attract the attention of their own target  audience. And this might be the headline for a news story published on their web site news office, the subject line of an email or a 140 character tweet on Twitter.

The headline will offer the promise of the value for the reader contained in the  content below the headline and rapidly establish relevance, but without giving it all away. It is reckoned only 1 in 5 get past the headline. And a survey of some 2 billion page views revealed 55% of visitors spent less than 15% on a page!

So what works? Numbers and personalization apparently. Headlines such as "10 ways to reduce heating bills" or "Ways you can pay less for heating". There are plenty of variations on the theme. The use of alliteration is memorable for example - "Heating bills: - ten top tips to save money." In fact there are already proven established headlines that can be re-purposed to suit.

Then of course there are the pun headlines beloved of the tabloid press - The Sun in particular.

Interactive outdoor - new tech billlboards

If you thought billboard advertising was 48 sheet posters, then take a look at interactive large digital advertising.

UKIP's spoof poster to Tory one

Traditionally in a general election campaign, political parties have favoured billboards, for advertising - the famous Saatchi brothers "Labour isn't working" is claimed to have won the General Election for Mrs Thatcher's Conservative party. Today the poster - and it is the poster, not posters - doesn't appear overnight as a nationwide campaign,  but on the back of a vehicle which serves as a backdrop for what in effect is a PR event. But this UK General Election is no longer a two horse race between Labour and Conservatives and this week the Conservatives duly unveiled a poster showing Labour leader Ed Milliband in the jacket pocket of former Scottish Nationalist leader Alex Salmond in a reference to the possibility of a Labour/SNP coalition. To this the UK Independence Party re-purposed the concept to illustrate Conservative leader David Cameron in the pocket of Euro boss Jean Claude Junker. Of course, whether most British voters would recognise the President of the European Commission is doubtful.

Digital and interactive

Meanwhile billboard advertising has gone digital and not just digital - interactive. Ocean Outdoor has recently teamed up with a charity and is using facial recognition technology to inter act with the advertisement. Read the story here.

Interestingly where advertising in print media is somewhat on the back foot, outdoor advertising seems to be embracing new technology.

Trying to unbundle package prices

Three things buyers are really interested in - does it do what I want, what is the price, and can I have it now? Product, Price and Place.

Known as the four P's of marketing - with the other being 'Promotion.' Recently I  have had cause to try to unravel the price of telephone calls which proved pretty challenging! Along with energy companies and banks, telecoms companies are pushing hard to dispense with paper bills and in fact charge for the service of providing them. OK so once the bill is retrieved from the Internet we find a typical quarterly bill runs to 7 or 8 pages of A4.

Payments are made monthly, charges for 'price packages' are monthly in advance and calls outside the   plan charged in arrears. Price increases involve refunding a portion of the advance charge, charging the new higher amount and allocating to the portion of the quarter to which the increase applies. So all straight forward so far. These are then totted up compared with your monthly payments, adjusted for any credit or debit brought forward and there is what you owe - or in credit if you are lucky. Now, try un-bundling the cost of calls from the packages so you can figure out how much it costs each time you call someone.

This price bundling gets even harder to work out for satellite TV  subscriptions. Deals of the discount type are reserved for new customers, whereas deals for existing customers are it seems opportunities to buy additional services, not to be rewarded for loyalty, by discounts. Banks similarly keep their loyal customers on the lowest interest rates for savings. Energy bills present similar challenges. It is also quite difficult to discuss price because the numbers you are given to call are for telesales people, anxious to upsell the package. A 30 minute call leads nowhere except back to the beginning when you are offered to be put through to the right department.

Perhaps it is this  pricing strategy that has created an opportunity for price comparison sites which seem to be running major marketing campaigns right now. Some of these TV  commercials can only be described as bizarre - from talking meerkats (compare the meerkat - get it?) to Sharon Osbourne holding a dog while a folically challenged man in suit jacket and lady's shorts and stiletos flounces past. Would you trust these guys to figure out a good price deal? Or is this really another sales ploy? 

Is advertising more than selling a dream?

"Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness. It's the smell of a new car. It's the freedom from fear. It's a billboard that screams the reassurance that, whatever you are doing, it's OK."

These are the words of Don Draper, creative director of Sterling Cooper in the TV  series Mad Men - or "boxed set" as current jargon now describes the format. It is a 'definition' from the sixties where Madison Avenue created consumer desire and aspirational heights that extolled the virtue of products from cigarettes to presidential candidates. Advertising portrayed a happy world, a permanently sunny upland which could be accessed through the purchase of these desirable products.  Advertising was about manipulation through great creativity.

Of course in the b-2-b world we had less glamorous products and much smaller budgets. However the advertising creativity today would be judged just as politically incorrect as Sterling Cooper extolling the benefits of cigarettes. Our target audience was largely electricians, the white van men who read the SUN newspaper and bought their products from electrical wholesalers. At the wholesaler's counter were copies of our free newspaper which moved the Sun's 'Page 3' girl to the front page with a full page image of her caressing a fluorescent light fitting, or luminaire as they are now called. Trade magazines carried their fair share of advertisements featuring models gazing longingly at, or draped across various electrical products. Many of the products were basically boxes with a label on. As a product manager the photo session could offer a pleasant change to the usual daily fare!

But even for Madison Avenue the limitless expense account fuelled lifestyle of an advertising agency is long past. As Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP has put it, today it is 'Maths Men' not 'Mad Men' in an increasingly digital world driven by data and digital publishing platforms.

The book of the blog

As a spin-off from this weekly marketing blog, a book is now in production, in so far as the text has now been handed over to the publishers.

Why a book? Sometimes a book is just easier to handle - flick through pages, bookmark references, share etc. OK,  so all these features and more are offered with digital versions, but somehow a book is nice to have. May be it's a generation thing having spent all my life with books there is a great familiarity with the format.

The book is divided into 3 main sections starting with a quick review of the rationale for marketing and why the sale of goods and services is not just a simple relationship between supply and demand. Section 2 looks at communication methods where here the digital options blend in with the traditional and are evaluated against marketing benchmarks. The third and final section is part of an on-going conversation, review and ideas of a still evolving digital marketing landscape.

 Over a period of up to 8 years I have experimented with a number of social media platforms to see how they operate and to help make an informed judgment of their value. This is an on-going experiment, the social media tools are constantly evolving, but their business models now depend on advertising revenue. It might be argued that financial success relies on advertising dollars and they have lost their ‘cool’ amongst the younger generation who have migrated to more edgy apps such as Whatapp, Soundcloud and Ello – the latter a rebellion against advertising.  I  set up and ‘road tested’ a few of the leading social media platforms which offer publishing online platforms that can be used for marketing content. The resource allocated to building and maintaining a presence has to be evaluated as you would for traditional print media. Questions such as, does the publication reach my target market, what is the investment and does it work?

 In short it's a constantly changing picture and the book will accordingly continue here - online.

The rise and rise of small businesses

The enterprise culture is being driven forward by small businesses in the UK, not big business it seems.

Two different  items that came my way this week highlighted how small business was contributing to the recovery of the economy. Lord Young reporting to the Prime minister noted that the last report into small business was the Bolton Report back in 1971 which concluded the small business sector of some three quarters of a million businesses at the time was in terminal decline and doomed for extinction. Today that pessimistic view is transformed with 5 million small businesses, 19 out of 20 employing less than 10 people, are leading the growth in jobs. Large firms he says are still important, they employ a third of the work force but thanks to technology they too need less people. Lord Young makes another interesting observation that the skills needed to work in small firms are entrepreneurial, while teamwork is what large firms need.

The second item was a card dropped through the door with the headline - " Your other office" -  promoting funkbunk - "the alternative workspace for people who work from home. "  Funkbunk (I  know - don't ask) is a workhub with "hot desking" facilities and meeting space. They claim 13% of people already work from home with 60% of employees forecast to join them in the next decade and they are providing a base for those who don't like the isolation of working alone and are better motivated in the entrepreneurial workspace they have created.

Big business meanwhile is getting bad press all the time - tax avoidance being the current worry. This does not even mention the still large public sector and the legislators in the European Union who write the laws for employment along with everything else!

So what does it all mean for marketing? Perhaps it is time to take a fresh look at where businesses are headed, who runs them, where they are and how marketing can accelerate their growth and success. 

More content posted but less engagement

With marketing teams churning out more content a report suggests this has resulted in less engagement.

A problem previously highlighted on this blog is that with the diversity of user contributed content, particularly through social media channels, there is a thirst for more volume of content published and published more frequently. It doesn't necessarily follow that there is more news of interest to the consumers of this information.

Turn the clock back a decade or so and and the PR person usually held regular meetings with the client to tease out news stories.  It was not uncommon in the b-2-b world for the client to start with the statement that 'we haven't got any news'. The role of the PR person was to probe recent projects that had some unusual features, the use of new technology, major contract wins, new appointments, exhibition plans and the rest to draw up a list of potentially interesting stories. Then to research the story and produce a few deemed worthy of a press release. After all the necessary reviews and approvals the final version and accompanying glossy photograph were mailed to the editors of the relevant trade press. And they dropped most of them in the trash. Approximately one in twenty went forward for publication.

Back to the present. The editorial waste bin no longer weeds out the junk news from the genuine stuff - the problem is now finding enough
to fill the growing options for self published news. The thing is the same old issues remain - there is not a lot of exciting content any more than there was before. But now there is nobody to bin the trivial stuff. Instead the consumer becomes the ultimate editor and soon learns to switch most of it to the junk box.

The report by Track Maven discovered that between the start of 2013 and end of 2014 marketers increased content by a whopping 78%, but engagement measured by clicks, likes, comments, retweets, favourites etc fell by 60%.  Even more telling 23% of content received no engagement at all! And 43% received less than 10 interactions.

The Inventor

Big organisations tend to attract large numbers of pitches from people who claim to have invented a new wonder product.

In previous marketing roles within large multi-national corporations I was frequently called upon to help company directors evaluate these inventions. Today the TV show Dragon's Den provides some outlet for the enthusiasm of the inventor and would be entrepreneur plus the opportunity to win investment capital and just as important expert advice. Typically the approach was made to the most senior people in our organization based on the fear that they didn't in years to come want to be known as the person who failed to recognise something which would emerge as a winner. In my experience, most ideas were neither novel or good and the inventors deluded and whacky.

The pitches were highly unprofessional and the inventors  hated being questioned and seemed amazed we didn't bite their hands off to buy the product. One example was someone who had taken a tungsten halogen flood light that we sold by the tens of thousands for under £10, attached a length of electrical conduit as a stand and a car wheel complete with tyre as a base. This was sitting in the chairman's office to which I  had been summoned to give an opinion. The inventor in this case was chairman of a major company!

A more bizarre example was an Australian who had a small package the size of a box of matches which allegedly contained a high frequency electronic ballast. A large audience had been assembled to witness the demonstration, which apparently showed a fluorescent tube being dimmed. We were all kept at least 10 yards away so we couldn't really see what he was up to. It was not a new technology at the time but was kind of complicated with patents  so we were evaluating different ideas. However, our inventor refused to discuss the technology or let us peek at the electronics without paying a million pound first. Not surprisingly neither he or his invention were ever seen again!

The Wall Planners have arrived

Some trade magazines around this time of year are mailed out with a folded up Wall Planner.

Included in the polythene envelope, along with the advertising material that many recipients open above a waste bin, are the 2015 wall planners. In case you are unfamiliar with the wall planner, they are basically a year's calendar surrounded by advertisements. Advertising space is often sold on the promise that the brand is in front of the target audience for a full a twelve months. Great value. Except, how many people actually stick them on an office wall. How many people actually have an office wall anyway? 

With many people working in open plan offices, at low level partitioned work stations or in a corner office with glass walls, there is limited wall space to stick these large posters. And be honest they don't look particularly elegant and get shabbier as the year progresses. But people still advertise on these wall planners. Why? Even before electronic calendars that sync with various desk top and portable devices the value was doubtful.

What is amazing that wall planners haven't gone the way of Reader Response cards and Fax backs. At least with those you could track the response!

The Book of the Blog

Publishing in 2015 a new book from Technical Marketing drawing on content from our blog.

Five top content topics

Content development has become a bit of a buzz word in recent times. We have looked at five important areas of information content that prospects will usually be looking for when they access your web site.

1. Products and services

Explain clearly what products or services your company is offering. Provide details of the products, their specifications and offer downloads of relevant information.

2. User reference and endorsement

Provide reference to satisfied users of your products using third party endorsements, product reviews and case studies to build confidence in the products.

3. Influencers

Cite the views of recognised opinion leaders and gurus in your field, particularly where their opinion is considered expert and impartial and reflects favourably on your product.

4. Subject guide

Offer an impartial guide to the market in which you operate that provides a useful summary or introduction to the market and helpful information on how to go about selecting the relevant products. A White Paper that outlines the technology, the state of the market and background information also helps present your business as knowledgable and expert.

5. Call to action

 Because there are several stages in the buying process from early research through to closure and order placement, offer means to contact you easily and at all stages. And offer future keep in touch options such as email news and social media. 

Competitive advantage

To avoid being lost amongst a mass of rival product or service suppliers, businesses should decide what can give them a competitive advantage. We can look at three different strategies for gaining such a competitive advantage - cost, specialisation or differentiation.

Today we will begin by talking about cost. Being the lowest cost producer is typically also related to volume. Investment in tooling, design for high volume production and cost effective routes to market are all factors in delivering the product at a low price. One company I  worked for, identified markets that needed high volumes of products. This suited a manufacturing strategy that enabled investment in specialised tooling, automated machinery and finely tuned assembly lines to turn out high volumes of products at the lowest cost in the market. Interestingly tenders were often won not on price, but due to the capability to deliver high volumes to customer timescales that competitors not set up for volume production couldn't meet. This not only generated a higher unit percentage gross margin , but also translated into higher cash earnings on the contract. And thanks to investment in production, usually a better quality, more consistent and reliable product than their competitors too.

In service industries the cost of supplying that service can be scrutinised at every stage in the process,  which may result in major changes to the way in which that service is delivered. Airlines provide an interesting example, where in recent years the established carriers have met tough challenges from low fare airlines. Referred to as disruptive innovation, South West Airlines developed a business model which others such as Ryanair and Easyjet have followed to grow into market leaders and at the same time expand the market by bringing  in customers who could not afford the fares set by the established carriers. By operating one type of aircraft, a point to point route structure, dispensing with inclusive passenger services such as meals and seat reservation, using smaller airports, fast turn arounds and many other cost-saving ideas, the cost of providing the service is significantly lower.

Interestingly, offering the basic product or service at a low price point results from stripping out all the so called 'frills'. The purchaser can then decide to buy these as an option. Things such as accessories that make the core product more useful which usually carry much higher margins than the the product itself. For airline passengers, buying food, checking in hold luggage, reserving seats rapidly rack up the total price of the ticket.

In short, low cost as a competitive advantage does not mean low margin. In fact the investment and volume can be a barrier to entry for other would be competitors, allowing the disruptive innovator to gain big shares of the market. The temptation is to try to take more of the market - the areas occupied by premium brands or businesses that specialise such a in custom products. That is a mistake that will confuse the customers.

Technical Marketing ideas for Engineers

When Andy, Steve and I set up Technical Marketing Ltd in 1999, b-2-b marketing communications were primarily display advertising in the trade press, exhibitions, mail shots, telemarketing, PR and product literature. The world wide web and email was slowly gaining traction, but use and acceptance was patchy at best.

We had arrived at TML  from running a global marketing team for a leading company in the entertainment technology sector. We had set up email piecemeal. The R&D teams in London and Los Angeles had an email set up which we linked up with a marketing network. Eventually the rest of the company realised the benefits of email and a company system followed. Web sites were not that impressive in the early days and print which was quite sophisticated was thought superior. Even then few people had PCs on their desk, mobile phones, or more often, car phones were still fitted into cars, or at least to some company cars.

It was into this background that  Technical Marketing Ltd was launched to introduce the emerging Internet technologies and indeed use them to run a 'virtual' business ourselves. In 2000 we launched a book - Technical Marketing Techniques - through Entertainment Technology Press which itself used then pioneering 'print on demand' methods. Fifteen years on, the Internet is an essential enabling technology for marketing - web sites, email and social media for a start. Updating the book became essential to recognise the massive changes in marketing possibilities. 

Because we started from an engineering background and many of our clients are smaller engineering companies, the new title - Technical Marketing Ideas for Engineers - is now preferred. The original book started with marketing theory, worked through product development and marketing communications before concluding with predictions for the future, including making the case for web sites, email marketing and e commerce. The new title retains the marketing theory introduction, but now includes digital marketing as a mainstream subject and includes much more discussion of the evolving marketing space. 
Look out for further announcements.

Once you could only buy advertising space or ‘buy’ editorial mention

Before the widespread adoption of the web there were only two significant options for a business to gain attention for its products in the media – to buy expensive advertising, or buy PR for third party column space. It was ‘above the line’ and ‘below the line’ promotion. The glitzy world of advertising or the manipulative black arts of press and public relations.

Then into this expensive publicity mix of advertising and PR along came the Internet and the World Wide Web. The media opened up to even the smallest business, not just locally, but globally. Since we published Techniques in Technical Marketing in 2000, the web has moved to a new phase with social media offering very affordable alternatives to the main ‘above the line’ media options.

Our book was intended as a simple introduction to marketing, particularly for engineers needing to understand how to go about presenting their products in a fast changing world. But technology enabled marketing has also been rapidly evolving. So it is time for a new book. A book looking at where marketing has been headed in the last decade and some things that owners and engineers in small to medium size businesses in the B-2-B area should know.

This week in marketing

It was the week BBC TV's Apprentice show had its annual go at advertising.

Whether it is a business programme or simply another game show loosely associated with business, the Apprentice is compelling viewing. Lord Sugar who presides as judge and jury - "You're Fired!" - has established himself as a celebrity business man, but what that business is these days is a bit vague since the distant days of Amstrad electronic consumer products. Of his two cohorts, Karren Brady is probably better known than PR veteran Nick Hewar who may have had the unenviable task of helping market the Amstrad stuff which Alan Sugar - as he was prior to his elevation to the peerage -memorably described in his first biography as "a mugs eyeful" to explain the point of LEDs blinking away on the front panel.  Karen meanwhile fronted Birmingham City FC at the time bank rolled by more interesting business men who were the real story for the press. If the 'board' are unusual business characters, the wanna be candidates are a potential employers worst nightmare.

After a recap of the previous week's disaster, the episode starts with a telephone call to the house where the would be apprentices are billeted together in ostentatious luxury. I thought it was said that the call was timed at 4.30 am, but maybe I  misheard, anyway the message is generally the same and along the lines that "the cars will be with you in 20 minutes", or "Lord Sugar will meet you in 30 minutes." How on earth they get showered, dressed and breakfasted in 20 minutes is intriguing and possibly the most challenging achievement of the task. Lord Sugar - everyone uses the 'Lord' bit as though he is real nobility - meets them at some well known London landmark each week to deliver the 'brief' - brief being just that and nobody ever has any questions despite the outcome for failure being a firing. Last night the venue was the American Embassy, the brief to develop a soft drink for the American market and create branding, TV ad and web site. His Lordship usually steps regally from a Rolls Royce, but due to some unspecified  reason appeared on a TV screen from some remote location, but still flanked by his two acolytes. Sufficient to say, the execution of the task was the usual fiasco and a lesson in how not to plan a product development and launch campaign.

Meanwhile over on Fox Business channel an executive of I think MCD Digital Agency in New York was being interviewed at top speed explaining the growth in digital adverting, citing Harvard research into investing in marketing during a recession and how those who over invested had gained market share. All good stuff and delivered in no more than a couple of minutes. Pity the apprentices sent to New York didn't look this guy up.

Finally another email from David Cameron. He likes sending me emails, but somehow it feels like stuff from an imaginary friend on Facebook. His friends, Boris Theresa and the rest email me too. it is well done and informative, yet somehow it doesn't have any emotional appeal that would motivate recipients to vote for Dave's party. It's business, factual logical and unemotional and well executed PR. But that's Dave's expertise. Interesting to see if it works at the General Election.

Time for budgets

For many companies the end of 2014 will also be the end of the budget year and marketing managers will be thinking about the budget for 2015.

Hopefully there will be a formal budget and not just a sum of money allocated to marketing. And that budget should be detailed, typically on a spreadsheet to show how the investment is to be deployed in accordance with a marketing plan. I use the term investment because the whole point of a marketing plan and the accompanying budget to implement it, is to achieve a return on the investment just the same as if investing in new plant to improve efficiency for example.

A problem with budgets is the tendency to take last years' numbers and add a few percent for inflation. This lazy approach prevents new ideas being funded and perpetuates spend on things which may no longer be valid, so it pays to rethink the marketing strategy,  marketing plan and supporting budget.

A question I sometimes  get asked is how much should the marketing budget be? Some people would like this expressed as a percentage of sales, but this will vary from business to business and what needs to be achieved. One approach is to decide the marketing strategy and write the marketing plan, then figure out the cost of implementation - 'to cost the need.' The reality for most companies is driven by affordability and then prioritising the budget for most effect.
  

Lest We Forget

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red

To the Fallen

They shall not grow old,
As we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn;
At the going down of the sun,
and in the morning,
We shall remember them.

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red 11.11.2014.

Photos: David Brooks

888,246

Blood Swept Lands And Seas of Red. Tower of London. 11.11.2014.

  Paul Cummins & Tom Piper. Photo: David Brooks.

It's a global market

The Internet has been a game changer for entrepreneurs by opening the door to a global market.

In a recent blog we reported on the growth of homepreneurs in the UK, some 2.9 million largely creative businesses operating from a home office. This group are distanced from the similarly large group of tradesmen - builders, painters, plumbers, gardeners and the rest serving very local customers. The home based entrepreneurial businesses are said to be contributing £300 billion a year to the UK economy, with one third operating in international markets. Interestingly 65% plan to stay home based.

Think about this for a moment. An important sector of the reviving UK economy is not based on a traditional business model and nearly two thirds plan to stay with this model and not convert to a 'bricks and mortar' operation. Clearly a lot of entrepreneurial talent finds the fluidity of this approach works for them. A big difference is that homepreneurs might be driving business forward in global markets, but are not necessarily creating new jobs on the traditional basis of providing premises to which employees can commute and earn a salary. Instead the work opportunities they create for others is more likely to be awarded to similar businesses or individuals who are not employees. In short the Internet has allowed home based entrepreneurial businesses to flourish without employees and the whole raft of management, personnel and legal issues that accompany the traditional model of providing employment. Entrepreneurs are not necessarily best at staff management any way and need to concentrate on the core aims of the business, not trying to do something they are not skilled at.

Now think about the approach of successive governments. Most have recognised the need to encourage new businesses to start up and over the years various incentives and support structures have been tried. But ultimately their goal seems to be one of providing employment opportunities. They actually talk about creating jobs. Do the entrepreneurs see that as their purpose, or are they thinking of wealth creation not job creation? Creating work for others is a consequence of the needs of a growing business rather than its purpose.

As we approach next year's general election, the European Union the source of most UK legislation is already a major issue with advocates  arguing that membership is vital since 3 million UK jobs are said to depend on the EU. What is not mentioned so often is that the UK is the EU's best customer and 5 million jobs are related to trade in this direction. Others draw attention to the huge membership cost to the UK and volume of legislation businesses have to comply with. Some 1,139 new business regulations were passed by Brussels in the last year alone. Meanwhile businesses are looking  at global markets, not just one geographic trade area.

So we have governments with a focus on finding ways to create jobs, not just via new businesses, but in the public sector. On the other hand businesses, certainly the new enterprises are pursuing wealth creation and ultimately that wealth will pay people and support public funds too through taxes. Whether the UK leaves the EU or not there will remain a big global marketing job to do, at home, in the EU and the whole world.

Supporting our troops & remembering the 888,246  British  fatalities in the Great War.