Richard has ten years' experience at Mintel and excels in identifying consumer trends and applying them for clients. In the past year, Richard has made presentations for the Media 360 and Financial Services Forum conferences and written on consumer trends for the magazines Argent and Viewpoint. Most recently he welcomed Mintel’s clients to our offices for a special look at the UK consumer in 2020.
Deep in the Hollywood vaults old innovations are being dusted down for new audiences. In the space of a few months we've seen Hollywood acclaim its silent movie past, bestowing The Artist and Hugo with Oscars and cinemas launch 4D vibrating seats. So what's the future? In both cases the answer might be simply: the past. A History of Silence In recent years Hollywood has been scorned for resorting to repetition. In 2011, Box Office Mojo recorded a record 27 mainstream sequels; prequel or spin-off releases (see The Year of Sequels). In this context, Oscar recognition for Michel Hazanavicius's The ...
Transferring from Incheon Airport to central Seoul is a lesson in scale - a 2 hour tutorial via train to be exact! This is a megalopolis of some 20 million and trying to get even an inkling of life here in 48 hours means spending lots of time on the city's subway service. Koreans while away the time by living up to their reputation for being the most digitally connected people on the planet. The trains' carriages have Wi-Fi boxes and at first glance it looks as everyone is online or streaming video, but this isn't quite the case. Look ...
At first Shanghai feels disconcertingly and disappointingly western - especially when you're staying in 'Times Square' and walking to work past an endless parade of Zaras, H&Ms, C&As and Burberrys. Having a drink at the former Shanghai Club - hangout for moneyed western merchants in the 20s - it's easy to ponder how much has changed and ask 'where's the east?' One answer might be 'behind the neon facades' - after all the Chinese are increasingly buying up ownership of the world's luxury brands for themselves and unashamedly glorying in their glitz. Even the city's Huangpu river dazzles like an ...
The official state welcome at Sydney's Kingsford Smith airport is somewhat friendlier than at Singapore. In arrivals you are greeted by "G'Day" banners, female immigration staff call you "mate" and even the sniffer dogs seem amiable. As part of Inspire's Big Issue trend presentation I've arrived in town with a 'cheeky pommie powerpoint' proclaiming Australians to be the 'fattest people on earth. Evidence is thin on the ground however, with Sydney's citizens seeming to share New Yorker's differentiation from their larger cousins inland. The national passion for the great outdoors seems to be winning the calorie battle in Sydney at ...
Singapore is often viewed as the 'soft landing' or entry point into Asia and its culture, but politically it's a somewhere with an especially hard-line stance. This is somewhere where the "Supernanny State" is watching, where you're given an immigration greeting card proclaiming "death to drug dealers" and where you can chuckle at signs affixed to walls proclaiming "no resting and no sitting". Singapore's mosquito car card was the forerunner of London's congestion zone, but the culture of state intervention can also be benign, as in the case of smartcards issued to its senior pedestrians that allow them more time ...
