What a Difference a Year Makes

Devon Wolfe, Pitney Bowes Business Insight

This time last summer, I was enjoying the opportunity to work out of our Windsor, UK operation for nine weeks.  Without question, it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career, as I got to see firsthand the nuances of doing location research in a different market than the United States.

But as I think back to just one year ago, I’m startled at how different things are.  The UK economy was still robust and growing at the time, despite the fact that gasoline (that’s petrol over there) was nearly $11 per gallon.  Many of my co-workers had heard about the slippage that was becoming apparent in the US economy and asked me about our business conditions.  And of course, the most common question in the UK was, “Will the Americans vote for Obama?”  Little did we know what was about to come. 

As I prepared to return to the US, I wrote my North American staff an e-mail recounting my observations.  One of those observations was how things change over time.  In Europe, history is everywhere around you—you can walk down a street and see evidence of 500 years or more of change.  But in the US, everything still seems more or less new.  We don’t have as much of a sense of history, and so big changes can seem uncomfortable to us, even though they are always rife with opportunity.

Now, a year later, we are experiencing profound change, discomfort, and opportunity in our businesses.  And more specifically, we see it here at PBBI.  A dramatically different economic environment, Web 2.0, social media, cloud computing, and increased demand for lower-cost solutions all are combining to create both the need and the opportunity to make dramatic changes in our offerings that will serve our customers in ways we had never imagined.

We’ve already responded to this change earlier this year by introducing a new service, MarketPulse, that allows retailers to understand and predict how macroeconomic forces affect consumer demand at the local level.  MarketPulse is available both as a stand-alone offering and as a component part of our forecasting and market planning solutions.

But there’s more to come.  We recently opened up a virtual Suggestion Box for our Strategy & Analytics consulting staff, and we received over 80 responses for innovations that will make our offerings better.  We’ve now grouped those into eight broad initiatives which will be pursued in the coming months.  I am truly excited about these initiatives and what they will mean for the way we serve our customers in the near future. 

Once we get those initiatives finished, we’ll roll up our sleeves and start a new set.  Change never ends . . .