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Brother’s UK development and strategy director top impact trends shares his six top impact trends you should be aware of…
There are loads of trends going on out there, but how much of them relate to you and what should you do with them?
My job at Brother is to try and make sense of information like that and look at impact trends. There are a lot of trends out there but not all of them will impact you or your business – it’s choosing the ones that do which actually matter. Here are the six impact trends we’ve chosen at Brother that are going to drive our future:
1. The declining printer market. According to year-on-year Context data, single function mono laser sales have declined, but mono laser all-in-ones have seen a big increase. It’s the same thing with colour laser printers – and ink too. So beware of taking a trend at face value, go and have a look around. You might think print is a dying trade, well it’s not, it’s alive and well.
2. Mobilisation. Where are people using devices and what are they using? Most work in an office, but increasingly they work at home, or elsewhere. So devices have got to be able to cope with this change in people’s usage. We now have Air Print and apps, so you can print from your tablet. At Brother we’ve also given all of our sales guys iPads and iPhones, and we’ve created apps they can use with resellers to give them better information.
3. Digitisation. This is a massive trend in our world. In the UK, the NHS plans to go paperless by 2018. This paperless office has been coming for years and years, I don’t think we’ll quite ever get there, but it’s a massive trend and it’s got government backing and it’s going to happen in some way. We have a new category of scanning devices – both desktop and mobile – and we’re creating new opportunities for our resellers.
4. Collaboration. We understand that people are working in disparate places these days. But you still need their input and to get them at the time you want them. Getting people in the same room is very difficult, but the web conferencing market is exponentially growing. We have a product called Omnijoin which does collaborations and meetings online. And we’re supporting that with cloud technologies as well as portals.
5. Relationships. We’ve found that these matter more than ever in business. If two partners trust each other, they both make better financial business. We have a new portal for our resellers and a telesales team dedicated to our resellers.
6. Solutions. The service industry in the UK is outperforming any other industry in terms of growth/GDP. Services and solutions are becoming a de facto expectation that businesses have when they deal with you.
