Cash remains king in UK shops

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Alternative/emerging means of payment, such as online payments and money-off coupons, grew last year seemingly by 150%, although these remained a fraction of the total. But cash remains the dominant payment mechanism.

Cash is still the most popular form of payment in UK shops but the popularity of vouchers and coupons is on the rise, research has suggested.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) analysed 10 billion retail payments in 2012 – 60% of all UK retail sales.

Cash accounted for about 54% of all transactions, but non-cash, non-card payments rose from less than 2% to 5% of the total.

via BBC News – Cash remains king in UK shops, says BRC.

Product name improvements

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Product names get changed and sometimes I wonder why and what the benefits were. But sometimes it makes a lot of sense. Look at these corkers:

  • Bovril was originally called ‘Johnston’s Fluid Beef’.
  • Hovis was originally called ‘Smith’s Patent Germ Bread’.
  • 7-Up was originally called ‘Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda’.
  • The Bank of America was originally called the Bank of Italy.

I’m not sure the Bank of Italy is in quite the same league but these examples, from 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off, are rather good.

 

Alternative words to solution or solutions

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Even the plumbers van says ‘plumbing solutions’ on the side! Give me strength.

Here are some alternative words to consider to describe what you do.

  • answers
  • applications
  • blueprint
  • framework
  • methodologies
  • process
  • protocol
  • software
  • strategies
  • systems
  • technique
  • technology
  • tools

Of course, the simple route of just saying what you you do e.g. plumber. A little too simple perhaps.

SaaS and cloud services for SMEs

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Start-up businesses used to have very different funding requirements. They used to have to buy in a lot of expensive services.

Today a company can launch, be effective and look very professional with a lot less money. The reason for this is the enormous range of SaaS (software as a service)/cloud services that are available to deliver everything from creative people to accountancy services.

Here is my list of services that I am using today.

Isn’t it wonderful what is free or nearly free? From the list of services I am using my favourites: Duedill, Eventbrite, Evernote, KashFlow and Mailchimp.

So your new business is off and running, with less finance required to get going than before. Maybe just money from “Friends, Family and Fools”. The next step in funding is changing as well; the serious arrival of crowdfunding is the thing to keep your eyes on.

Kickstarter www.kickstarter.com is probably the one you’ve read about Seedrs www.seedrs.com and Crowdfunder www.crowdfunder.co.uk are worth looking at as well.

The report is dead

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Timing is a funny old thing. I was looking through my emails to find a report template and I came across this blog post that proclaimed that reports are dead.

Do you remember reports? They are like newspapers. Historical documents, relevant and extremely interesting. If you like history.

via The Report Is Dead | cluetrainee’s blog.

A good blog post and I’ll consider not compiling my report icon smile The report is dead