Bogeys, Bullets and Bafflement at the Belfry

Last week's BIG Conference - the only such B2B research bash in the world - opened last Wednesday with its infamous pre-sessions entertainments. Features Editor Teresa Lynch reports on the question researchers couldn't answer (or understand), and explains why Apple is not an innovator.

As predicted last year, BIG (the Business Information Group) has now moved the conference venue to The Belfry golf resort in Sutton Coldfield, famous for hosting the Ryder Cup. This allowed the participants in the pre-conference golf tournament to play, mostly, bad golf on a world famous course. After an initial downpour the players were rewarded for their early arrival with perfect sunshine and greens like carpets.

The post-dinner quiz was as gruelling, if not more so, than in previous years. One question was so complicated that it had to be abandoned when a room full of professionals accustomed to dealing with complicated statistics couldn't understand how they were supposed to derive a ratio based on the UK's performance at the last 6 Olympic Games. We can only hope that the late hour and the prodigious quantities of alcohol were implicated in the befuddlement of some of the country's finest analytical brains.

No such befuddlement the next morning at a charming performance by Professor Patrick (Paddy) Barwise, Emeritus Professor of Management and Marketing at the London Business School, in a talk based on his new book Beyond the Familiar. Barwise told the delegates that there was no marketing 'silver bullet' which could help a company achieve sustained organic profit growth, certainly not, in his opinion, that of constant innovation. However he did give some very useful pointers to the less dramatic but more attainable goal of making sure that organizations were capable of sustaining growth by a process of continually improving the product which they were already selling.

He illustrated this with examples of very different types of company behaviour: from GM, whom he said had had 'six decades of not listening to their customer' to Apple who he insisted was not an innovator but a 'highly disruptive, user-focused fast follower'. To emphasise the second of these he pointed out that tablet computers had been around for 10 years prior to Apple producing something that while lacking many of the features of these existing machines was just 'plain easier to use'. He said that Apple hadn't taken chances on innovation since the Newton PDA flopped and that it specialized in bringing out a 'ruthless me too' product followed up very quickly with a version two to address all the things its customers told it were wrong with version one.

Wavering between the very academic and the quite salesy - lots of 'remember these key points' interspersed with 'you really should read the book' - this keynote was a highly appropriate start for a conference which promises to mix some fairly heavy weight papers with some more light hearted moments.

More coverage in the next two to three days, including of course our very own MrWeb workshop.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.