Woolies going to the wall, MFI collapsing like a badly constructed flat-pack chest of drawers. The next big name on the high-street or retail park to bite the dust is anybody’s guess.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but Woolies missed a trick in trying to beat Tesco at selling cheap toasters, DVDs and games, instead of concentrating on what it did best. Namely the Pick’n'mix and spectacularly surly assistants.
Seriously though, as company’s fold, then so do potential clients for us, and that is worrying. The less players there are in the market then the less accounts there are for us to work on. As any biologist will tell you, diversity is the key to allowing life on earth to adapt and prosper. That is why we have a competition commission.
But as companies go then new ones will come along to replace them. They may not be on the high-street in the same way as before but the new guys will still need to differentiate themselves from the competition in some way. Advertising is one way of doing this and radio should be part of that. In fact, when you think about it, if everyone else is fighting to catch people’s eyes as they are surfing the web (surely there must be a better name for this activity now?) then why not go for their ears instead?