Eno Land:
advanced consumer enagement.
Welcome to Eno Land
Eno Land operates on the extreme edge of developments in consumer engagement and related fields. Based in Scotland, it’s run by Ed Nolan more as a personal skunk lab and collaboration vehicle rather than contracting directly with any clients.
My work mainly revolves around the holisitc consumer retail journey along the path to purchase, with a focus on developing scaleable disruptive solutions that have the potential to redefine the vendor – consumer dynamic.
A theme common to a lot of my work is offline attrribution. But much like alchemy or designing a perpertual motion machine, achieving this (at scale anyway) is proving elusive. Though the rapidly changing retail landscape may deliver the breakthrough needed for this to succeed.
This site is only intended to give those browsing it a broad overview of my approach. If you are curious and would like to learn more, or perhaps spark a conversation about a related subject then don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Ed
There’s always a CUE at Eno
Convenience – Utility – Experience : These tenets form the immutable triptych that underpin my development thesis. Any solution failing to deliver on even just one of these tests will ultimately plateau prematurely, throttling its ultimate potential.
Although a keen adopter of emerging technologies I’m also a strong advocate of performing a real world analysis of them, i.e. performing sanity checks before writing them.
Contrarian and right?
The progress of online retail has been impressive, further accelerated by the advent of Covid, but offline still firmly retains retail’s crown jewels of immediacy, presence and experience.
Far from online being the harbinger of high streets’ denouement, I take the view of online as the goose that laid the golden egg right on its doorstep. The challenges now facing the high street have created a sense of urgency and the conditions necessary for incubating some of my contrarian views.
Gone in 120 seconds (or less)
Where consumers fail to successfully grasp a new technology within two attempts lasting no longer than one minute each the adoption rate dramatically falls. Its epitaph has already written and the window of opportunity can be lost forever.
Even if there’s genuine utility within, if they can’t get it out of the wrapper in the first place it’s not going to be that sticky. Unless there is something really juicy or essential at the other end many people simply won’t persist.
Mass consumer adoption should never be taken for granted, regardless of how fervent early adopters are or how loyal a company’s consumer base is.
Likewise network effects, apart from a few rare examples, cannot be relied on to corral or mandate consumer behviour. Network effects today are increasingly ethereal in the face of disrupters who innately view them as an invitation to plunder.
Thinking outside the cave
Troglodytic myopia is a narrow-minded fixation suffered by those who operate in self-perpetuating echo chambers.
The powerful geofences that social circles, corporate cultures, standard industry practices or indeed perceived norms imposed by society can strip the agency from even the most high functioning individuals, preventing them from exercising any creative or independent thought.
Whilst narrow and deep domain expertise certainly has its place, this alone is merely an unrefined commodity whose value is effectively pegged to a broad market rate.
To unlock the true value of expertise or knowledge, novel connections have to be made between each area in order to create the innovation intersections that will spark genuinely disruptive opportunities.
Venturing into new territories or culture zones for inspiration and knowledge, or deviating / questioning the consensus can be a daunting prospect, but as a lifelong inquisitive autodidactic this has always been my default approach.
Meaningful exposure to a wide range of subjects in a variety of fields is useful in understanding the wider potential applications and true potential of any technology or business model.
The disciplines listed below influence and frame my approach to consumer engagement, invariably this will involve the novel application of existing technologies and practices within each field.
This approach is further informed by a diverse range of subject interests which at first may appear ostensibly tangential but are inexorably linked in one way or another to consumer engagement.