What is your view on industry awards?
Last night was the London Football Awards, "Celebrating the very best of London Football" in 2023.
The winner of Manager of the Year was Tottenham's Ange Postecoglou who has only been at the club for half a year. His big achievement in 2023 was joining Spurs and getting them to 5th in the table on New Year's Day.
Last year was the year David Moyes led West Ham to the Europa Conference, and Richie Wellens won League Two with Leyton Orient - returning them to League One for the first time since 2015. these are proper achievements.
You also have Mikel Arteta whose Arsenal team finished 2nd and are currently in the title race again. All 3 of these candidates clearly had a better 2023 than Postecoglou.
The Goalkeeper of the Year award went to Guglielmo Vicario, who like Postecoglou only joined Tottenham last summer. What has he actually achieved during his 6-months at Tottenham to be voted Keeper of the Year?
And this got me thinking about industry awards in general.
I have worked for companies who loved industry awards, and for CEO's that saw them as a waste of time.
You usually have to pay to enter the majority of industry awards (something in the region of £250 an award), and you get offered to buy either single seats or an entire table.
My feeling has always been that if you pay to enter enough awards (maybe 4 or 5 per event), and purchase a table (often upwards of £1,000), you can almost guarantee yourself winning something, regardless of it you deserve it.
Those that run the ceremonies will want you to come back next year - something you will not do if you have splashed out £2k and left empty handed.
For your investment, you get to name yourself "Best Campaign of the Year" or "Most Innovative Company", and then use the award wins in your marketing material for the year.
There would be nothing stopping me setting up the "Football Merchandise Awards", and awarding "Large Retailer of the Year", "Small Retailer of the Year", "Campaign of the Year" and "New Product of the Year" all to Kick Off Merchants. But ultimately what will it mean?
So it will be interesting to get your thoughts from both sides of the spectrum:
As a business owner / sales person, do you think industry awards are with the investment?
As a consumer or buyer, do awards influence your decision as to what company you use?
Have a great Friday!
CEO at TWCG,LLC THE WALLSTREET CAPITAL GROUP
1moInteresting in that I mentored several Berkley undergrad students in NYC by request, I personally delivered a White paper on comprehensive Liquidity Risk mgmt & Wallstreet compliance to the midtown NYC campus and then a course syllabus and published a related text book. Never heard a word, although college & other academics are closed groups of people. No real world experts and professionals alllowed in to teach the REAL WORLD, experience, where you have to perform and compete or you may get fired. Pay for Performance, no dead weight, 30 year lifers with Job Security. Typical government in many cases, Not all, I had some great Professors at Western International University who were accomplished Finance & Wallstreet experts and pushed the MBA students hard requiring a 100 page thesis & presentation to graduate and to prove you Mastered a deep dive on the Financial statements, M&A, Currency trading etc, etc.