Tuesday, 03 Sep 2013 15:35 GMT

The aliens have landed

Setting off at some revolting time in the morning and making my way to Gatwick and a remote privately-owned car park for my annual holiday, I made one very geeky observation to my wife and infant son; the road signage was both saturated and amazing.

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Setting off at some revolting time in the morning and making my way to Gatwick and a remote privately-owned car park for my annual holiday, I made one very geeky observation to my wife and infant son; the road signage was both saturated and amazing.

This was everything from flood lit A-boards in fields, to a series of no less than ten digitally printed high-vis signs guiding us along the dark and winding back roads to our destination.

Even the car park’s sign involved lettering of such glitz and intense levels of halo illumination that I was sure it must have been left by an advanced alien civilisation—if not it will certainly be the landing site for one.
 To contrast, when we touched down in Moscow and got in a taxi to wade our way through snarls of leaded petrol smog for an hour, there was largely road-side darkness.


Even the car park’s sign involved lettering of such glitz and intense levels of halo illumination that I was sure it must have been left by an advanced alien civilisation—if not it will certainly be the landing site for one ”

The next morning I was flicking through my plane reading, a back issue of The Economist,  and my eyes came to rest on an article titled: Crazy Diamonds. The first line read: “True entrepreneurs find worth in the worthless and possibility in the impossible.”

What has this got to do with a drive to Gatwick? Well, it got me thinking. Without the ability to buy really high-quality signage at an affordable price, this entrepreneurial idea of starting a remote off-site car park—now a licence to print money—would never have got off the ground.

Indeed, if you think of almost any successful UK entrepreneur, their idea lives or dies by the ability to market itself through our industry’s technology and its relativity low price levels. The darkened Moscow is a case in point—it generally costs between five and ten times more, like-for-like, for any signage medium in the city. It is also has very low levels of serious entrepreneurial activity, no coincidence I think.

So, the next time you speak to a prospective customer embarking on a new business, it is perhaps worth highlighting the true power of our sectors output.
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