Reading Time: 4 minutes It is said that CSR is how companies build their reputation and contribute to helping the world. Cynics suggest that CSR has sprung from a need by corporates to justify what they were doing to the world. Either way, it’s failed to turn things around so far: CSR hasn’t made a material difference to global […]
Category: Archive
Forget supply and demand. Think supply and desire.
Reading Time: 3 minutes According to mainstream marketing theory, price is decided by supply and demand and fluctuates accordingly. In today’s market however, pricing is increasingly about supply and desire. The rules of volatility have changed. The upgrade culture, shorter product lifetimes and highly efficient distribution chains have flattened the gaps between supply and demand in so many sectors, […]
Brand management: The dangers of yes, no and clothing the Emperor.
Reading Time: 3 minutes People buy brands, not managers. And yet think about the number of managers who make judgment calls, sometimes very big judgment calls, based on their own opinions and experiences? They feel comfortable because they are expressing views and making decisions that fit with their worldview. But that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily doing the brand justice, […]
Words always have a wider context
Reading Time: 2 minutes [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzgzim5m7oU] Perhaps you’ve seen this video about the power of words, perhaps not. The storyline itself may have been attributed to David Ogilvy, nevertheless, it is a powerful story that offers critical insights into how we should think about words and their influence in this age of storytelling. The clear intention is to demonstrate that […]
30 things you should tell employees before you change the culture
Reading Time: 2 minutes By Mark Di Somma What sort of information should decision makers share with employees as an organisation prepares to go through a significant cultural shift? These are my thoughts sized in digestible chunks. Order of course may vary. 1. The future that we now see for the organisation 2. How we discovered that we […]
You’re not just pitching to win the business (you’re there to decide if you want the business)
Reading Time: 2 minutes The purpose of a face-to-face pitch is only partly to make the case for why you should be hired. The other part, the bigger part in my view, is that you’re looking to see behind the corporate face and to gauge the likelihood for mutual respect and profitability. Reciprocity. And in that sense, a pitch […]
The new brand strategy dichotomy: likeable or cult
Reading Time: 2 minutes Some excellent points raised by Carol Phillips in her post The Hostile Brand Strategy on Branding Strategy Insider. I’ve said for some time that the middle market is the muddle market – and that a more polemic approach by brands is, in my view, inevitable.
Evolution or transformation? 17 key brand factors
Reading Time: 3 minutes No business these days can just sit pretty. But the extent and nature of changes confuses many. Brands evolve. Or die. But they must also retain something of what consumers know. Or they fade. So which is more important? And how should a brand act, when? I get asked about this a lot. So here […]
8 ways to react when the knives come out
Reading Time: 2 minutes Being non-popular is not the same as being unpopular. Brands that are non-popular are simply not prepared to do whatever it takes to court popular favour. They do their own thing, their own way – and look to attract cult followings via like minds. But brands that have become unpopular have lost likeability. That’s a […]
Don’t just provide reasons to buy. Change the reason for buying.
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s tempting when your product all but parallels that of your competitors to be drawn into a meaningless war: a fight for market share that revolves around devaluing (looking to price the other guy out), trivial pursuit (nit-picking on features in a bid to show technical advantage) or overshadowing (spending up large in mainstream media […]
When projects don’t stack: the fine art of understanding mistakes
Reading Time: 2 minutes By Mark Di Somma When a project doesn’t meet expectations, I’m fascinated by what gets asked, who does the asking and what, if anything, emerges as the key learning. My view is that we should treat projects that don’t go to plan not so much as wreckages but rather as breakages: they occur when the […]
Nailing your opinions: creating a powerful brand manifesto
Reading Time: 2 minutes On All Saint’s Day 1517, Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses on the door of Castle Church, sparking, in the eyes of many, what would become the Protestant Reformation. Whether or not he actually did post the Theses (of course there is historical debate) and what that generated are off-topic, but the action of pinning […]