YouWish

Hi All

This week saw the anniversary of the death of a man who proves the point that  none of us should allow lack of time to get in the way of pursuing what we know we wish to achieve.

His school life had been unremarkable other than exclusion from one school for disruptive behaviour. In his early 20’s he had found it hard to get a job in his chosen field so accepted one as a technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office.

Here he stayed for 7 years. However whilst no doubt contemporaries were out and about of an evening he kept pursuing his mathematical theories.

One of these was the Special Theory of Relativity that would be published in 1916.  In 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics.

Ok so Einstein had the benefit of a brain with areas of reasoning 15% larger than most people but don’t we all have ambitions that remain unrealised and consequently we underachieve?

I do. What about you?

No brainer.

Until tomorrow.

Nick

As the world becomes ever more interlinked, the division of labour is now on a global scale. The manufacturing clout of the new Eastern economic powerhouses is the globalised equivalent of the industrialised North of Italy, or the mills of Northern England. The division of labour is the same, it’s just that now the things we buy are made in Shenzen rather than Sheffield.

Now that the UK economy is primarily service based, the natural result has been the emergence of countless niche services. If you have a need, no matter how unusual, you can be sure that in 21st century Britain you can pay someone to fulfil it for you. But with all this choice, does a one size-fits-all web search give you the best result? Search engines can certainly find the cheapest prices for one-size-fits-all products, think TVs, flights or credit cards, but when your need is more important or more costly, a personal response based on your specific requirements is more apt.

Unlike traditional search, YouWish doesn’t give preferred placement to the companies with the biggest advertising budget, when you place a wish, the responses you get will only be from companies that can meet your specific requirements.

Can you imagine any business in this economic environment turning down real customers?

Well bizarrely that is what I have experienced in the last 2 weeks. You Wish has a number of real customers looking for unusual things. We facilitate the matching of these customers with businesses that sell the relevant products and services. At the moment we are in a free trial so any customers we bring to a business are free. This is a sensible strategy for a new service that needs to register a range of different businesses.

Most companies I ring to sign up to respond to these customers are delighted with the You Wish proposition and service. However, I have been amazed to see that some are just too suspicious of a new company and a new service to want to proceed. For example a furniture company could not believe we had a customer who wished for a bespoke TV Cabinet, that had not found them. They assume that busy people have time to search endlessly for solutions on any search engine, but this is naive. This business would rather miss out on the chance of serving a customer than try out something new. It all sounds too good to be true, they cry! It sounds like another marketing wheeze! Well it’s a sad state of affairs if “marketing” is responsible for bringing such cynicism into the business environment. We clearly all need to do a better job of policing our own industry.