Category: Archive

How 6 factors critically influence the effects of corporate scandals

Reading Time: 10 minutes Everyone’s very quick to call almost any bad news another example of corporate scandals these days. We are in the grip it seems of “the outrage orchestra” as Chris Wren so delightfully describes it. Nevertheless, companies do get into trouble, and they emerge from those challenges in different states. Some seem to brush off what […]

The Singularity Strategy: Choosing to over-commit

Reading Time: 5 minutes Every day, companies are pitched opportunities to take their business in a ‘new’ direction or to stay the course—by colleagues, by their consulting agencies, because of the actions of competitors or by delegations of customers or suppliers. It can be, as many a marketing manager has told me, bewildering. And many struggle to balance the […]

Building real brand trust in a world full of fake

Reading Time: 8 minutes Once, it was easy to build brand trust. You used mass media to establish profile and credibility, you became a “household name” and that was pretty much it. No longer of course. The splintering of channels, new levels of transparency and increasing expectations from customers have made just ‘being’ a trusted brand almost impossible. Trust […]

What can happen when you change your brand name

Reading Time: 3 minutes Dunkin’ Donuts has announced that it is dropping the ‘Donuts’ part of its name in selected stores in order to highlight there’s more to the brand than the products it’s synonymous with. But when you’re this well known, is changing your brand name a smart move?

Here’s why creating customer value is so hard

Reading Time: 8 minutes Customer value is one of the most talked about aspects of marketing today, but many senior decision makers are hard pushed to articulate how exactly their business is creating meaningful customer value and how that tangibly contributes to their business being more valuable and competitive. Even if they can put that into words, a powerful […]

Why branding experts need to step out of their silos

Reading Time: < 1 minute In our latest article at Entrepreneur, Pete Canalichio and I examine why now, more than ever, the marketing consulting industry should be promoting an interactive brand ecosystem that more closely aligns the disciplines of brand insights, brand strategy, brand protection, brand licensing and brand valuation. The full article is available here. Hope you enjoy it. […]

How to excel as a business storyteller, now that everyone’s doing it

Reading Time: 8 minutes Stories are now such a *thing* even in a B2B context that it’s easy to think that every marketer can and should be a business storyteller. Effective business storytelling though is harder than it looks. If you back yourselves to tell an extraordinary story that the people who buy from you will want to specifically […]

How come it’s cool now to hate on strategy?

Reading Time: 8 minutes I read recently that less than one third of businesses undertake regular customer research. They don’t feel they have the time or the budget it seems to wait for answers, and they don’t see the value in doing so. They prefer to trust their own perceptions and experiences. They’re drawn to action plans.

Why some innovative ideas work, and most don’t

Reading Time: 10 minutes We hear a lot about how fast and how much the world is moving. But when companies pursue innovative ideas to cater to what they think is consumers’ fascination with the new and shiny, reactions can be mixed. The trap for marketers in this is that there are different types of “newness”: from the ‘new’ […]