Google’s Retail Summit

I was really pleased to be invited to moderate a discussion at the Google Retail Summit – on “eCommerce Excellent – winning this Christmas”.

The event brought the great and good together to hear from Google and each other and followed the successful and enjoyable inaugural event last year (Google’s site, my blog post).

On my panel I was joined – with great humour and good will – by Steve Robinson, CEO, M&M Direct, Nick Lansley, Head of Innovation and R&D, Tesco and John Hinchcliffe, CMO, N Brown Group. We’d decided beforehand that we’d avoid the blander approaches one sometimes gets at industry events and try to deal head on with some of the hard choices and real differences this Christmas. I was really pleased that they entered into this and can’t remember chuckling so much during a panel before 😉 Hats off to Steve, Nick and John.

Here’s the eminent Peter Fitzgerald of Google opening proceedings: note the Lolo colours, courtesy of ToyCamera iPhone app…

The next panel was on KPIs and featured Michael Ross of eCommera (@manross) in fine form on his pet topic – KPIs. I won’t quote some of his excellent one-liners since not only would that be ‘goal-poaching’, but because Michael’s doing an article for November’s Internet Retailing magazine and I don’t want to scoop ourselves. Watch this space.

Finally on the photo front, here’s the lab squad (or some other name) of Google engineers around to answer questions. All good fun.

I understand that the event was filmed and so – if our panel session makes it past the censor’s cuts for language, sarcasm and career-limited comments – I’ll post the link.