March 17, 2010

• A little birdy told me…

“Heard in front of the coffee machine:Sarko+Carla=Over. From now on Carla+Biolay=big love.” March 9th

It was the above statement that sent cyberspace into a furore of gossip, babble and accusations of adulterous rendezvous on the part of first lady of France, Carla Bruni and her husband, Nicolas Sarkozy. Posted by Franck Rieusset, an intern at Warner Bros near Paris, on the social networking and micro-blogging site Twitter, his offhand tweet sent the cyber rumour mill into overload, with the gossip spreading like wildfire amongst Twitter users and inevitably being picked up by the media.

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March 12, 2010

• MII South East Marketing Awards

We dusted off our glad rags and headed to Mount Juliet for the Marketing Institute South East Marketing Awards. Two projects that we worked on were shortlisted for the awards.

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March 04, 2010

• Brand value versus brand values in recessionary times

Aldi has just opened in my neighbourhood. For a working mother of 3 - it’s the best news I’ve had in a long time (yes, yes I probably need to get out a bit more). I pottered down there on Sunday morning and knew every second person there, such was the level of local interest. Just five minutes away is our local Supervalu, expensive but good for last-minute shopping on a Friday night. I would say it will be wiped out by Aldi despite their expensive rebranding exercise a couple of years ago that hung on the proposition: “Real Food, Real People”. Unfortunately, feel-good brand propositions such as that one won’t fly when people place more value on real value than they do on brand values. How might Supervalu respond?

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February 04, 2010

• Updates from Kitui in Kenya

About 3 years ago we switched our support from a household name charity to a small, 100% voluntary charitable organisation called the Friends of Kitui. We know and trust the people involved and liked their practical, respectful and honest approach to making a difference in Africa.

Kitui is a part of Kenya with huge challenges and no economy to speak of. Friends of Kitui have a clear strategy that begins with providing water and goes on to support education and entrepreneurship. We have committed to funding a water project there every two years. This removes the travel time taken every day to access water, freeing people for education and work and providing them with the water they need to live and grow food. Last year we funded the development of a dam at Makonga which brought water to 500 people in the immediate area. The main thing we have learned from our involvement is how little money it takes to make a huge difference over there.

We recently received updates from Friends of Kitui. They are now exploring the development of a poultry project and we’re hoping to find a mechanism for contributing some skills and knowledge to help make it work. To us, entrepreneurship is a way to generate wealth. To them, entrepreneurship is a way to make a basic living. It puts our so-called recession into perspective and highlights the inequality inherent in our global economy.

If you are interested in the idea of enabling entrepreneurship in Africa, consider Friends of Kitui, you can be sure that your contribution is making a real difference there.

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