Monthly Archives: April 2019

« Climat – Et si on arrêtait de prendre l’avion » titrait le quotidien Libération le 3 avril dernier. Provocatrice ou moralisatrice, cette Une met le doigt sur une problématique propre à l’industrie. À l’heure où le « flygskam », cette honte de prendre l’avion gagne du terrain chez nos cousins Suédois, les professionnels du Travel commencent à réagir. L’électrique peut être une alternative. Après la voiture, l’avion de demain sera-t-il hybride ? Plusieurs compagnies aériennes semblent y entrevoir une solution pour réduire leur émission de CO².C’est le cas notamment de Mokulele Airlines. La compagnie hawaïenne prévoit de tester un modèle hybride entre les aéroports de Kahului et Hana. L’expérimentation aura lieu en septembre ou octobre a rapporté le Honolulu Star Adviser. L’appareil pourra accueillir jusqu’à neuf passagers. Bien qu’elle dépende de plusieurs facteurs, sa portée devrait lui permettre de pratiquer l’intégralité des routes de Mokulele Airlines avec des réserves. Dans le cadre de l’opération, la compagnie aérienne collabore avec le constructeur Ampaire.Réduire les coûts de carburant et de maintenanceÀ Hawaï, les vols court-courriers figurent parmi les principaux modes de transports pour se déplacer entre les îles de l’archipel. Un avion hybride permettrait ainsi de réduire les coûts d’exploitation, d’offrir des liaisons supplémentaires et des vols plus fréquents. Pour le fabricant Ampaire, le court-courrier s’avère être une opportunité de mettre en avant les bénéfices de sa technologie. Cette dernière pourrait potentiellement réduire les coûts de carburant de 50 à 70 % et ceux de maintenance de 25 % à 50 %, rapporte le constructeur.

The perks here aren’t revolutionary. Apple gives card-owners 2 percent cash back when they use their iPhone to pay, or 1 percent cash back when they swipe the physical card, built not from plastic but from titanium. Purchases at Apple stores earn 3 percent cash back. Sure! Fine.But don’t be fooled. What Apple is really doing is, as Kapadia says, upending the user experience. Those cash back rewards? They show up the next day, in the Daily Cash app, makes spending money feel like a fun game. You reach customer service through Messages. You can see where a particular charge was made in Apple Maps. Spending summaries show up in beautiful, color-coded graphs, and you use an aesthetically pleasing wheel to decide how much of your balance you want to pay down. It’s all very soothing and makes the act of spending money feel fun, even productive.What does Apple get out of this? For one thing, it lets its ever-growing ecosystem of apps, services, and hardware take over even more parts of your life. Want to spend money beautifully and seamlessly? You’re going to need an iPhone.It also gets to shape what the future of spending looks like, in ways both small and big. Consider that a few years ago, the idea of paying for anything with a smartphone would have seemed ridiculous. Now, no one blinks an eye when you tap your screen against a card reader in the check-out line. Oh, you still carry a wallet? How quaint!Those changes can feel like big wins for you and me. Don’t we all want less friction in our financial transactions? And the big tech companies have a tremendous ability to change how retailers take our money. Apple Pay, which was introduced in 2014, is now accepted as a payment method in 74 of the top 100 retailers in the US; Android Pay and Samsung Pay, which offer similar convenience for non-iPhones, have also grown in popularity.Imagine how Big Tech could also change the status quo for payment security, by replacing those tired and vulnerable credit card numbers with smarter forms of authentication. Imagine, too, how all of these consumer conveniences might overshadow our suspicions about handing over the finer details of our financial lives to Big Tech. Apple says it won’t snoop on your spending, and that’s nice. But that’s not to say that the next company to issue a credit card—Google, or Facebook—won’t sell your monthly statement to the highest bidder. Data is the new money, but also, money is data.That’s all to say that what the tech giants do matters when it comes to money and the way we spend it. And it’s not just Apple. There are wild, weird ideas across the land. Forget paying for stuff with your iPhone—Amazon has experimented with a payments system that uses facial recognition to automatically charge you for whatever you take from a store. Facebook is supposedly creating its own cryptocurrency, one FaceCoin to rule them all. WeChat, the Chinese social media platform, has driven cash to near-extinction in China with WePay, its own mobile payments system. Those shifts aren’t just the latest technological fad. They’re changes that will impact our society for years to come.

La réaction n’a pas tardé. Un mois après avoir dévoilé des pertes de près d’un milliard d’euros sur son exercice 2018, le groupe Auchan a annoncé, mardi 30 avril, la mise en vente de 21 de ses sites en France jugés « sans perspective réaliste de retour à la rentabilité ». Selon la CFDT, les postes de 723 salariés sont concernés par l’opération.Le groupe, qui s’est engagé dans un vaste plan de réformes destiné à réduire ses pertes financières, a précisé à ses partenaires sociaux réunis en comité social et économique, mardi, que si ces 21 sites (des supermarchés, un hypermarché, des entrepôts et des drive) ne trouvaient pas preneur « un plan de sauvegarde de l’emploi (PSE) sera (…) ouvert ».

Au Bon Marché, les produits naturels représentent environ 30% de l’offre totale des soins du visage et ce chiffre croît d’année en année. Le Printemps situé sur le Boulevard Haussmann a, quant à lui, rassemblé l’ensemble de ces produits naturels dans un nouvel univers baptisé « Le Green Market » .  Les enseignes spécialisées ne sont pas en reste. Sephora a ainsi réuni ses produits naturels et ceux intégrant des composants clés et puissants comme l’huile de coco, l’eau de rose, le charbon et le miel dans son espace « Super Ingrédients ». La gamme de soins Green de Marionnaud est, quant à elle, composée à plus de 90% d’ingrédients d’origine naturelle. Des lancements à la pelle Les géants de la cosmétiques multiplient, à leur tour, le lancement de nouveaux produits pour éviter que des petites marques continuent de leur grignoter des parts de marché. Cette année, une avalanche de nouveaux labels certifiés bio vont débarquer dans les rayons des grandes surfaces. L’Oréal a notamment créé de toutes pièces la marque La Provençale à l’huile d’olive bio AOC Provence . Henkel Beauty Care a réagi en proposant depuis le mois de janvier sous le label Naturale Antica Erboristeria (NAE) vingt-cinq références de soins du visage et du corps ainsi que des gels douches des savons et des déodorants certifiés bio. Beaucoup de consommateurs ne risquent toutefois pas de ce contenter de ces initiatives. Les farouches opposants au plastique représentent notamment un véritable casse-tête pour les fabricants. « Vendre des crèmes de soin en vrac et proposer des contenants sans plastique va forcer les marques à revoir toutes les compositions de leurs produits », assure Clara Schisler qui a travaillé plus de seize ans chez l’Oréal avant de co-fonder l’enseigne « MadameMonsieur ». Quant on vous dit que l’enfer est pavé de bonnes intentions…

It is perhaps no surprise that UK consumer confidence has entered its third month at -13, given the unwavering lack of clarity surrounding Britain’s future.While March held a small degree of optimism for people’s own financial prospects, April has seen the dial swing the other way, with scores for both personal financial situation over the last 12 months (-1), and over next 12 months (-2), down.The major purchase index, which registers likelihood to make a big purchase such as furniture or electrical goods, also decreased by 8 points to 12. However, this is still two points higher than in April 2018.This is according to GfK’s long-running Consumer Confidence Index, which charts Britons’ confidence in five key areas.Perhaps unexpectedly, faith in the economy appears to be growing, with the index for the general economic situation over the past 12 months up 3 points, while confidence in the economy over the next 12 months has moved up 2 points.“We’ve recorded three months in a row at – 13 for the Overall Index Score and we seldom see that ‘stuck-in-the-mud’ pattern,” says Joe Staton, client strategy director at GfK.“The key point is that consumer confidence is trapped in negative territory and we have not seen a positive Overall Index Score since January 2016. It’s all down to the uncertainty over Brexit. We may have enjoyed a surprisingly warm Easter weekend recently but consumer sentiment is as cold as ice and there’s no sign of a thaw anytime soon.”

The ripple effect emanating from the 2008 global financial crisis continues to be felt in 2019. A decade on, 66% of British people say they do not trust financial institutions to work in the best interests of UK society, according to YouGov Omnibus research carried out last year.Fear persists to the point that 63% of respondents are worried the banks could cause another financial crisis.Just as trust in traditional banking has broken down, the fintech revolution has revved up several gears as consumers embrace the chance to manage money at their fingertips.Over the past 12 months, 32% of people have used a banking app to make a mobile payment or transfer money, rising to 48% among those aged 15 to 34, according to Ipsos Mori data. Some 11% of those surveyed have used an app from an online-only or mobile-only bank.This wider shift to managing money online has fuelled a desire for clarity and transparency in payments and investments. No longer closed off and opaque, these sectors are being opened up by digital players focused on transparency and prioritising customer choice.This approach resonates with millennial and Gen Z consumers, because they do not care about the old ways of doing things, insists Gary Rohloff, co-founder and managing director of payment platform Laybuy. He argues the millennial market in particular has shifted away from credit cards after seeing what debt did to people during the recession.We ask ourselves, would a bank do this? And if the answer is yes, we don’t do it.David Sandström, Klarna“The global financial crisis shook the world and there’s still a hangover. Young people who have lived through that are very sceptical about the whole finance sector as a result,” Rohloff states.“Plus, we’re all busy and we want control over what’s happening with our money, because it’s hard won and if I’m having to pay people for stuff I don’t really understand that gets me into trouble. It’s just not right.”This is the premise behind Laybuy, an interest free payments platform which spreads the cost of purchases online or in-store across six instalments. The consumer pays the first instalment upfront and then can choose which day of the week they want the subsequent five payments to come out of their account over the remaining weeks.Based on the internal strapline ‘making the desirable affordable responsibly’, Laybuy has been designed with transparency at its heart. Consumers, for example, receive a notification saying the payment will be coming out of their account the day before the due date. If the payment is missed they have a 24-hour grace period to make the payment, otherwise their Laybuy account is suspended and a £6 late payment fee incurred.

According to a November 2018 study from Alliance Data, a majority of the consumers surveyed said they want more control over email frequency and the content they receive from brands. However, only a small number of marketers said they are meeting those needs.Another pain point is the lack of personalization that goes into brand outreach. A February 2019 study from Havas found that nine out of 10 consumers expect brands to deliver content. However, 58% of content created by the world’s leading 1,800 brands is "poor, irrelevant and fails to deliver," according to the report.

His actual choice—starting an organization called the Center for Humane Technology and then obsessing over language—seems, in one way, remarkably unambitious. If you really believe that the most powerful companies in the world are destroying the human species, shouldn’t you counterattack with more than a sharpie and a thesaurus?Harris doesn’t buy that argument. For one thing, he’s good at language, so why shouldn’t he focus on it? More importantly, he believes in its power. Pressed on this point, he recalls a moment back at Stanford. “We studied the power of language semiotics and Alfred Korzybski and people like him,” he says. “And they have this concept that something doesn’t exist until there’s a language symbol for it. I used to think of that as a kind of a poetic thing. But I’m really convinced now that language actually does create things, and it creates momentum and pressure. That’s why we’re focused on it.”He believes this phenomenon was at play over the past two years. Yes, the world began to question Silicon Valley in part because of the election of Donald Trump and in part because our addiction to our devices seemed so obvious. But the sense of alarm also spiked because people had language that allowed them to name the icky feelings they had about what their phones were doing to them and to society. They had language that helped them center their thoughts and thus their critique.Harris is sometimes called the conscience of Silicon Valley, but it’s more accurate to say that he’s the spokesperson for the conscience of Silicon Valley. His campaign has been run without writing code, without hiring engineers, and without Harris getting arrested on a picket line by the Menlo Park police. Oddly, his critics sometimes embrace him more tightly than his allies. And he’s completely comfortable with this role. All he wants is the perfect phrase.But will this new phrase catch on? Will there be network television specials soon about “human downgrading,” and will Zuckerberg appropriate it for one of his periodic essays? Perhaps. It’s clever and original. It plays on some of the themes expounded by Yuval Noah Harari in his best-selling books, without sounding exactly like Yuval Noah Harari. It twins nicely with the fears that people have about being rendered obsolete in a world of near-infinite Moore’s law upgrades. It sounds both existentially threatening and manageable.

Ford Motor a annoncé investir 500 millions de dollars (446,7 millions d'euros) dans Rivian Automotive, une start-up américaine de véhicules électriques soutenue par Amazon, concurrente potentielle de Tesla.Le groupe automobile américain va utiliser le châssis de Rivian combinant un moteur électrique, des batteries et des commandes pour construire un nouveau véhicule destiné à l'Amérique du Nord. Ni le modèle ni le calendrier de sortie n'ont été précisés.Jim Hackett, le directeur général de Ford, a déclaré que l'accord avec Rivian n'allait pas avoir d'incidence sur les discussions en cours avec Volkswagen."Cela n'interfère pas" avec Volkswagen, a-t-il dit lors d'une conférence téléphonique. "C'est une plate-forme particulière qui nous aide dans des domaines où nous n'envisagions pas de travailler avec d'autres."Les constructeurs allemand et américain se sont engagés en janvier à réfléchir à une collaboration sur le développement de véhicules électriques et autonomes et ils ont signé en mars un accord pour développer ensemble un pick-up.

Monthly purchases made via smart speakers in the US rose by 5.4% between January 2018 and January 2019, per data from voice tech companies Voicebot and Voicify. However, those who shopped using voice accounted for less than one-fifth of smart speaker users.We forecast that 74.2 million people in the US—22.4% of the population—will use a smart speaker in 2019. While 26.1% of smart speaker owners told Voicebot and Voicify that they had made a purchase using a smart speaker at least once, 15.0% claimed to do so monthly, and only 3.9% reported shopping this way daily.