AdVoice: Why Consumer-to-Consumer Communication Wins

Having worked tirelessly to inspire young people to pursue entrepreneurial career paths and tackling youth unemployment in the UK over the past nine years, 27-year-old entrepreneur Rajeeb Dey tops the list of people and British businesses being honoured with the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion. The success of 152 businesses has been recognised this year: 116 exporting companies have won ‘Awards for International Trade’; 27 for ‘Innovation’, and nine for ‘Sustainable Development’ benefitting the environment, society and the economy.

By Devon Shire: I occasionally fail to follow my better judgment and find myself watching one of the business news channels, with a steady stream of talking heads, each of whom is willing to supply answers to questions that they have no business attempting to answer. It is dangerous listening to advice from people who don’t know how to say “I don’t know." Also dangerous is not being aware that the best thing to ever happen to these networks was the financial panic of 2008. For them, fear equals ratings.

Although women have made huge strides recently, they only make up three percent of VCs and 12 percent of angel investors. Binto Brown is trying to fix that.

Capitalism is known for both its efficiency and its creative destruction; despite the drive for ever more efficient methods of production, the contemporary economy still creates an enormous amount of waste. Now, devotees of the concept of sustainable design are looking to natural processes as inspiration for new ways to bring greater efficiency to modern manufacturing and usher in the next wave of creative destruction.   

It is very simple. Adam Smith understood it and commented on it. If you allow businesses to have control of the market they will take benefits they don’t deserve at the expense of society. And many business will seek every opportunity to collude with other businesses to stop the free market from reducing their profits and instead instituting anti-competitive practices. Unless you stop this you don’t get the benefits of free market capitalism.

Customer service is absolutely essential for businesses, especially small ones. If they have any hope of surviving they have to get customers to come and stay. Great service is the key to that.

LET'S take a break from patting the Fed on the back to talk about some of the potential difficulties inherent in the Fed's current communications strategy. At the Financial Times old ECB hand Lorenzo Bini Smaghi writes: