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Showing posts from May, 2024

The New Trolley Problem: Retail's Abandoned Carts

  It's happened again.  Your cookies have tracked what seemed to be an engaged, potentially high-spending customer across your website. They lingered the appropriate amount, clicked suitably quickly, examined the full, carefully-crafted description your copywriter had two fits of screaming profanity, three breaks to cry in the loo, and one episode of throwing a hardbacked version of the Oxford English Dictionary  at a colleague's head before their words were finally approved. The customer's virtual basket shows enough variety to suggest new marketing angles, but not so much that your software can't categorise them effectively. It will be possible for the software to prompt the tried-and-tested selection of marketing approaches that (mostly) work with their demographic. To appeal to their ambitions, their glittering image of themselves, their fears, their hopes, their prejudices, and, in doing so, get more money from them. Then - disaster! They've left your website!

Mind the Gap in Workplace Mental Health

  "Mental health at work" has become something of a buzz phrase in recent years, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. "Mental health" is the reason people "need to get back to the office" - because the extroverts are suffering, since they're no longer able to dominate meetings, talk people into agreeing to take on more work than they're actually comfortable with, or enthusiastically create a situation where, if getting drunk with people you already spend too much time with, or leaping on a zip wire, aren't really your thing, you're "unadventurous", "anti-social", and "not really a team player." The UK government insist work is good  for our "mental health", even as successful GPs decide they literally can't carry on anymore, and choose a permanent solution to the problem of burnout.  While the low wages, in comparison to the cost of living, and long hours of many jobs are actually c

Don't Be 'Tone Deaf' to Deaf Inclusion

  The 6th-13th May is Deaf Awareness Week  in the UK, where 12million people are Deaf, or hard of hearing, with 'hard of hearing' including individuals with some hearing loss, as well as those with conditions such as tinnitus   and Auditory Processing Disorder . At The Productive Pessimist, our Director and Management Consultancy Lead, Ash, lives with tinnitus, Auditory Processing Disorder, and some manual hearing loss.  He has given a short insight into the challenges this causes him, and what helps (and what makes life an absolute nightmare!) Ash: I found out I had physical (referred to as 'manual') hearing loss in my teens. At the age of 38, I have very limited hearing in my left ear, though my right ear is fine. (Frustratingly, this is completely the opposite way round to my sight loss, where I have no sight in my right eye, and limited sight in my left - if the ears and eyes could link up, that would be great!)  Fortunately, my hearing is not likely to deteriorate