Paul Blunden

Paul's bio

Paul Blunden's career in Sales and Marketing spanned over 20 years and led him to Foviance in 2001 where he is now CEO. He holds an MBA from Cranfield School of Management, a Diploma in Marketing from CIM and is a Graduate of the CIPD. Paul is a regular commentator on cross-channel customer experience at conferences and in the media.

"I am particularly interested in the delivery of service, commerce and business functions across multiple channels; how they impact the strategy and operations of new, and in particular old economy companies and how this in turn is impacting the evolution of customer experience."

“Never try, never fail, those are the words I live by”, or so says Drew Carey’s character Crank in the animated kids film ‘Robots’. I heard these words coming from the back of the car a few days ago as I headed off on holiday with the family for a week in North Devon. You could run a business by that motto but I’m not sure it would last long or be an exciting place to work.

On the contrary,  it is the belief of both my team and I that we must try, that sees Foviance opening for business in China this quarter, with a new office in Shanghai. Read more…

I’m delighted to be able to share a recent conversation I had with Frank Ma, a close associate in China for the last two years now, and the man who will be responsible for ensuring the success of Foviance’s exciting new venture in Shanghai – Foviance Asia.

Frank, can you tell me a bit about your background and what attracted you to research?

I started out in research over 13 years ago right out of university. Like many fresh graduates I had little clue of what I wanted to do except that I wanted to get exposure to a number of different industries. This is what the research offers – a chance to work with a broad range of companies and learn how they do things. Read more…

Daniele Fiandaca’s opinion piece (NMA 04 Feb) raised the question of whether digital agencies were focussed on aesthetics at the expense of user experience.  I am delighted to see this issue being discussed because over recent years user experience (UX) has become “un-sexy” and the column inches that were dedicated to the subject back in the early 2000’s when it was new and exciting are all but forgotten. Read more…

In response to NMA article, 21 January 2010 Peter McCormack, co-founder of McCormack and Morrison, makes some interesting points in his opinion piece in published in NMA 21st January.

If brands are truly throwing away their traditional marketing campaigns in favour of third party channels such as Facebook then I would agree it is unwise – but only ‘today‘. Because today you cannot connect the dots and establish the identity of twitter’ers and other anonymous users of social networks, but that will not always be the case. There will come a time when total transparency exists online and your anonymity will be lost. Read more…

Blink and you might miss it – The Tipping Point for mobile customer engagement might be upon us quicker than we thought.If, like me you are reading Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant new book ‘What the Dog Saw’ you will have come across the term ‘creeping determinism’, a concept attributed to psychologist Baruch Fischhoff who first came up with it thirty five years ago. The principle states that as time goes by we start to convince ourselves that what has now happened was in fact always going to happen. Furthermore, through this process of enlightened hindsight, we convince ourselves so entirely, that any doubt we may have had upfront diminishes and is lost from our memory. Read more…

If there is one word that sums up the year we have just been through it would be ‘unpredictable’. I have heard it said again and again in every area of our customers’ and our own business.

A year ago, when I put together my round up of the year for the 2008 year end newsletter, the recession was really gaining momentum on the back of the credit crunch and we already faced a very difficult outlook. In 2009 with the recession in full-swing, business was in constant flux – one day there would be no projects underway the next there would be a half a dozen urgent propositions. Like every agency and consultancy in our industry, we had to become masters at expecting the unexpected and delivering great experiences for our clients. Read more…

Ashley Friedlein is founder and CEO of Econsultancy. In the latest Foviance podcast, we discussed the development of customer experience outside the UK.

Ashley, can I first ask you to tell me a little bit about how things are going with Econsultancy? I know you’ve set up recently in the US, possibly at the worst possible time during the recession?

Yes, it’s an interesting one. New York probably feels it particularly keenly, and it felt a lot bleaker than the UK. It was a pretty miserable economic situation, but the good thing is that it means you can get good people for less money than you normally can, it means that estate agents are very nice to you for a change, and you get decent property for less money. When we set up Econsultancy in the UK, we did it in the dot.com crash period, and everyone said then that we were crazy to be doing what we were doing, but as a result we had a kind of clear run and no competition for about three years, so actually as a time to build a brand, arguably it’s a good time. It’s effectively a start up for us. It wasn’t projected to make any money this year, and I think we’ll achieve that, and it’s going well in terms of raising the traffic, the links, the brand, recruitment, so we’re pretty happy.
Read more…

Part 2 of Paul Blunden’s interview with Ashley Friedlein, CEO of Econsultancy. We discussed the development of customer experience outside the UK.

You can listen to Part 1 of the interview where Ashley Friedlein talks about Twitter in our Expert Interview section.

• Episode title: Ashley Friedlein on Customer Experience
• Episode number: 6
• Series: on Customer Experience
• Duration: 25 minutes

Listen now:

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Or, Download the Ashley Friedlein on customer experience podcast (MP3, 11mb)

An abridged version of the conversation between Ashley Friedlein and Paul Blunden can be read in our October Newsletter.

Alternatively you can also read the Podcast transcript.