Marketing & Innovation - marketing, strategy, innovation & social media

Is France World Champion for Sales? with @pipedrive

27/07/201813/08/2018Yann Gourvennec

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Is France World Champion for Sales?

France, world champion of sales? Give me a break…

Here is a fun content marketing exercise I thought I’d like to offer my readers as a gift, just before closing this blog for the Summer season. CRM company Pipedrive’s content marketing manager shared this infographic with me and I found it well designed and perfectly apt with regard to the Visionary Marketing blog. Well done Pipedrive, here are people who know how to use Twitter!

Given France’s reputation one the (sales) pitch, the answer to the above question is a resounding “no”. France isn’t even listed in the top 20 world countries in terms of conversion rates. The Pipedrive people have calculated the conversion rates of the different countries from the data in their database and they have come up with their own World sales championship ranking. Note that Australians took their revenge on “les bleus”, they are in 4th place.

Good news, our German friends, always best in class are even worse than us. Definitely not a good year for Mezut Özil and his pals (well, former pals as it were).

La France championne du monde de la vente — France is better at football than Sales

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Digital Transformation and Influencer Marketing – a @Traackr interview

25/07/201825/07/2018Yann Gourvennec

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Digital Transformation is buzzword de rigueur. It’s also a very important part of today’s strategy for business as explained by Didier Bonnet who revisited his book Leading Digital with us in a recent interview. Today it’s my turn to share an interview I gave for Traackr, the leading influence management platform and which was published on their blog. The piece was published by Traackr’s Morgane Néret.

Yann and Hervé Kabla’s book Mastering Digital Marketing Like A Boss, brings forth a perspective of digital transformation that delineates its present and future impacts on digital communications across all domains and professions. The book guides an organisation to effectively implement digital techniques into its strategy.

Q1 – How would you define digital transformation? And what is at stake?

First, it is important to distinguish between the concept of a transformation and that of a change: a transformation is a shift towards an unknown state, and as with anything unknown, some may find it unsettling. Read more →

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A La Carte Internet Means No Internet

23/07/201824/07/2018Yann Gourvennec

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A La Carte Internet, does that mean anything to you? Is the free and open Internet a thing of the past? When I asked Benedetta to write a story up about Net neutrality, I was mostly thinking about a potential two-speed Internet. What she discovered when researching the subject was that very few people cared about this. It is as if no one cared about their own right to free speech and free enterprise. Now what is happening and was revealed by the Wall Street Journal last night, is another kind of threat, where the Internet is directly manipulated by authoritarian Governments so as to show, or rather hide, certain websites to transform the free network which we know and love into some sort of A la Carte Internet. Much more of a threat than anything we had ever imagined.

To an extent, what we are witnessing in some Middle Eastern countries and namely Egypt, where already 500 websites have been blocked, is not really new. China banned Facebook nearly 10 years ago and believe it or not, not many voices have been heard to pinpoint the fact that the largest country in the world was walling off the free Internet and at the same time, freedom of speech. Instead, we hear songs of praise for the new Chinese behemoths whereas in fact as all Chinese Internet companies are vetted by the ever more powerful government, and have been able to grow because of steps that were taken to stifle competition in the country and namely preventing American companies from stepping in (let me tell you, they are not alone).

A la carte Internet - WSJ — WSJ warns us agains an A la Carte Internet designed by dictators

The irony is, as Sir Tim Berners-Lee rightfully pointed out not so long ago, that these very American Internet companies — even though we love them — might also a threat to the free Internet and certainly open innovation. Not because they are “wicked”, but because they are now part of a de facto monopoly. Voices are heard here and there about dismantling Google and other companies which made the Internet what it is today, not to mention Facebook.

An A La Carte Internet means no Internet at all

To sum up, there are three major threats surrounding the preservation — not to mention further development — of the free Internet : one is the oligopoly which concentrates so much of the power of the Internet in the hands of a few businesses and is fought — somewhat clumsily most of the time — by the European Union. A second threat is made of the so-called two-speed Internet advocated by some, namely in the US but also in Europe (therefore promising a “faster Internet” which is a way of slowing down the information superhighway we have grown to love and build upon throughout the years). A third one, probably the least auspicious, is made by censorship as shown in the following WSJ piece. It is really high time that Europeans — and people around the world — wake up and read Benedetta’s article if we do not want to be imposed this A la Carte Internet because an A la Carte Internet means no Internet at all. Read more →

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Net neutrality: the end of the free Internet?

19/07/201823/07/2018Benedetta Reschini

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Editor’s note: Benedetta is a French 3rd year student (equivalent to fourth form in the English Grammar-School system) who spent a week at Visionary Marketing as an intern to discover the world of business. As part of this internship, I asked her to use her linguistic abilities (she is Italian and speaks three languages fluently) to build an overview of net neutrality through the Italian, English and French-speaking press in Europe. In spite of her young age- she is only 14 years old- Benedetta showed a great maturity and her analysis of this extremely complex subject of free internet is relevant and pertinent. So, I decided to publish this article for the benefit of our readers.

As the United States is one of the most powerful countries in the world, the question whether Trump government’s decision on the Internet will affect Europe and the rest of the world is a fascinating one to look at. I have looked into how net neutrality is approached in different countries, namely France, Great Britain, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland.

What is net neutrality?

What will happen tomorrow to the Internet we know today?

Net neutrality ensures that all traffic on the Internet is treated in the same way, so that Internet service providers do not act with favoritism over content that passes through their “pipes” [i.e., physical (telecom) networks]. Blogs and newspapers have been focusing on this topic since the Trump administration decided to remove this neutrality in the United States. Le Figaro even called it “Christmas gifts to telecom giants”.

But why?

This decision has indeed favored the interests of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) such as Verizon, AT & T and Sprint. Since December 14, 2017, US Internet service providers have the right to encourage the traffic of companies that have the means to pay and leave all others on a slow lane, thus creating a two-speed network. Verizon has stated, however, that it will not use this right.

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