David Bowen commentaries

In his regular columns for the Financial Times and ft.com, senior consultant David Bowen has pursued themes ranged from customer relationship management and career marketing to ‘ethical’ retailing and royal family sites. His collected Financial Times and ft.com columns from January 2001 onward are indexed by theme and available for viewing on this site.

You can access articles directly by selecting a link below.

  • What Big Pharma is doing to inoculate its reputation Bird flu has turned up the public spotlight on pharmaceutical companies. How they are responding on the web indicates that Big Pharma has discovered ways to exploit the medium’s potential for getting across a complex viewpoint.
  • How stakeholders are better treated in times of trouble As bankruptcies stack up in the US airline industry the stricken companies are taking the radical step of using their websites as bulletin boards to keep key stakeholder groups informed – though some are told more than others.
  • How protesters have lost all sense of reasoning online Groups using the upcoming G8 summit in Scotland to campaign against the world economic order have already set up camp online to lay claim to the moral high ground. Their protest sites show the power of the web as a vehicle for expressing an opinion – an
  • Why international organisations seem to be falling apart Worldwide bodies such as the United Nations can be surprisingly quick to react effectively on the web when controversy calls them to account. But beyond the immediate issue, many collapse into near incoherence.
  • How effectiveness depends on knowing when to be hard and when soft The uses organisations make of their websites fall into two categories – hard and soft. Distinguishing between them and finding the right level of interplay can attract more visitors and achieve multiple goals.
  • Why it's worth cracking the Da Vinci code Until recently few people seemed to have registered that the web is the obvious medium with which to defend your reputation. Now some are, and any company, government or organisation with a reputational problem can learn a lot from Opus Dei’s current ef
  • Where fashionable brands trip up in their transfer to the web Luxury brands and the web go together like strawberries and gravy, but that does not stop the great brand-owners from pouring money into sites. The results are mixed, to say the least.
  • How Europeans and Americans deploy different tactics to defend their reputations Reputation management is a hot topic with companies as much as governments on both sides of the Atlantic. But while Europe’s corporate giants use their websites to carry the war of words to their opponents, in America they starve them of the oxygen of p
  • Where to check out best practice in the art of the possible The more possibilities the web opens up as a medium, the greater the complexities it presents in managing a website’s effectiveness. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the financial services sector, where over the past two years banks have been
  • How the worldwide web can work at community level Attempts to make the web work at a local level are hostage to continuing supplies of enthusiasm and funding. But the efforts of community site builders have thrown up three potentially viable models – and some lessons for grassroots ‘communities’ wi

BC Tip: Going against the tide

A Twitter-free news strategy has some logic. more...

BC Tip: Timetabling convenience

The advantages that HTML formatting can give over the PDF format. more...

Comment: How do you meet the website challenge?

Web managers confront common issues on their own diverse turfs, but our research into their site traffic reveals much about the collective response, Dan Drury says. more...