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Part 2: The Owners
In the second of my looks at football’s finances, I turn my attention to the owners. We’ve had them all: entrepreneurs, biscuit magnates, Statler & Waldorf from the Muppets (at Liverpool unfortunately), Arab Sheiks, Russian oligarchs – even Alan Sugar. The basic make-up of a football club owner has changed drastically over [...]
Part 1: The Team
Football – it’s a game of two halves. Increasingly those halves are divided monetarily into the haves and have-nots. The influx of cash into the national sport, catalysed by Sky Television, has created a behemoth that while more adored than ever in the sense of global popularity, is also increasingly resented by [...]
“I don’t know much about art. But I know what I hate. And I don’t hate this.” – C. Montgomery Burns
Customers are smart. They don’t all have PhDs, or know loads about engineering, product development, marketing, PR, but they do know what they like. And they don’t like Google Buzz. I always think of customers [...]
Wimbledon is well into its swing as I write this, and the crowds thronging Murray Mount (or whatever they’re calling it this week) bear witness to the lasting appeal of the tournament, even in the current economic climate. Wimbledon really shouldn’t be this popular – it takes place mostly in the week, for a start, [...]
If western governments ran a lecture series on ‘Saving the World 101’, the most interesting one to turn up to would probably be snappily titled: ‘Leveraging the Woes of the Car Industry to Force Through Eco-Friendly Vehicle Production’. Or ‘Blackmail’, for short.
It’s the nature of politics. You scratch my back, I don’t stab you in [...]
We use these word clouds quite a lot at FreshMinds Research to visually represent qualitative information. They allow our clients to quickly digest what their customers say about them most often, and they brighten up presentations to boot. So after President Obama’s inauguration speech today we generated this -
Unsurprisingly, ‘America’ and ‘nation’ figure prominently, as [...]
It sounds like an exotic drink, but Pecha Kucha is a lot more research related. In December FreshMinds Research were invited to the Pecha Kucha event being run by the Association of Qualitative Researchers (AQR). Pecha Kucha was invented in 2003 by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham as a designers’ ‘show-and-tell’ event to attract more people to [...]
“Well, it started badly, it tailed off a little in the middle, and the less said about the end, the better. But, apart from that, excellent.”
Ah, the movie test screening. Responsible for excising scenes, recasting actors, and in some cases changing the entire endings of movies before they ever reach the eyeballs of the general [...]
“The possession stats don’t really tell the whole story.”
As an avid follower of the beautiful game, how many times have I heard those words from the commentators? Probably in 68.7% of games I watch, to ape the dubious stat attack that greets the modern armchair football fan. My colleague Mike posted a great article about [...]
Every company wants new customers. It would be a short-lived and foolish company that said “You know what? We’ve got the right amount now, let’s stop”. But as important as new customers are, companies are learning, especially as we enter a recession, that your existing ones matter more. Customers aren’t bound to you for life [...]
