Athletic Business Conference Presentation on Technology

Last week I presented at Athletic Business regarding technologies impact on the fitness and wellness industry. The bottom line is rapidly advancing technologies, a shift in values resulting from a maturing culture and traditional organizations failures to adopt collaboration as a key strategy, have contributed to the fitness and wellness industry largely failing to meet the opportunity of impacting obesity and promoting wellness. Look at the facts, thousands of new facilities and endeavors yet the same number of  people exercising and more prevalent obesity. Because of financial pressures related to soaring health care costs, new business models will emerge with many encompassing direct to consumer components that bypass traditional gym or fitness facilities. Some traditional facility competitors in the fitness business will use this as an opportunity to distiguish themselves based on the experience economy, providing more engaging and meaningful experiences through unique program solutions offered by strategic partners (an adoption of orchestration strategy). As with many industries designed around past paradigms, the fitness and wellness industry should prepare for an approaching upheaval that will leave many of its participants irrelevant to the future of wellness.

 

 

 

The Era of Advertising is Over

This relevant slide show reflects an obvious truth - the era of advertising is over. Promotion and marketing is not a separate function per se - its all about the product and service and how that integrates features which satisfies customer needs. From there the customer will evangelize the product or service for you.

The Newspaper Business - Going, Going, Gone


Many organizations today simply are not embracing the tools available to compete effectively. Maureen Dowd's recent op ed piece reflects moves by one newspaper to embrace global orchestration strategy. More organizations should look closely at this means of driving down cost while enhancing outcomes.

Here's the opening quote: "I visited the future, and it was wearing a bow tie and calling itself “Thomas Edison.”

The newspaper business is not only crumpling up, James Macpherson informed me here, it is probably holding “a one-way ticket to Bangalore.”

Check out the NY Times and read for yourself.

Evolution web 1, web 2, web 3.0

Largely marketing terms that represent conceptual notions of the web, 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 are expertly explained in this video. Note that the semantic web is thought to not be emerging as quickly in this clip, however, the rate of change and associated adoption of semantic technologies will outpace what is anticipated here. The web will ultimately become aware and intelligent and sooner than many think.