My name is Ian Shepherd, and movingtribes.com is my home for writing, sharing content and other digital things.
Over the last 25 years, I have served as Chief Operating Officer of Odeon (Europe’s largest cinema business), CEO of Game Group (a pan-European retailer with over 1300 stores) and held senior commercial and retail leadership roles for world-leading brands including Vodafone and Sky TV.
Over that period, I have seen the seismic shift from ‘analogue to digital’ in multiple industries along with the changes in consumer behaviour that followed. I’ve seen businesses grow and succeed, but also seen businesses challenged and ultimately defeated by those changing consumer needs.
I have also worked with start-ups, entrepreneurs and innovators and have hands-on experience with the emerging disciplines of data science, customer analytics and with the technologies that power digital retailing.
My objective here is to turn this unusual combination of experiences into blogs, discussions and debates that help inform and support others in consumer businesses as they wrestle with the challenge of keeping up with the customer in a fast changing world.
Update – Jan 23 – rather than chasing me over LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media places, you can now find most of my regular editorial writing on consumer and retail matters at the Moving Tribes Substack page. It is free to subscribe for regular updates, so do pop over and get involved.
And if you like the writing here and on Substack, then I have a treat for you since I’ve also written 2 books!
My first book, Reinventing Retail, was published in 2019 and is a ‘manifesto’ for the future of retail based on my own experiences and my observations of the successes and failures of retailers of all shapes and sizes around the world. I’ve written a little about it here, and if that intrigues you then why not read the introduction to the book which is available as a download here.
My second book was published in September 2020. The Average is Always Wrong is a practical book about data science and analytics written for people in business. There are lots of books about data science out there, but they are usually written for (and by) data scientists. With several decades of experience leading analytics teams and marketing functions, I wanted to write the book that de-mystifies all the jargon and provides a real-world guide to transforming a business into a data centric one. Read more about it on the Books page of this site, and when it is published, let me know if you think I’ve succeeded!
