Reading Time: 11 minutes We hear a lot about the effects that technology and developments like AI will have on jobs and workforces. But powerful forces already operate in markets to actively undermine value and drive out distinctiveness. It’s one thing to know that. It’s quite another to develop a broad differentiation strategy capable of stopping it.
Category: Archive
How to unthink the loops and deliver astonishing creativity
Reading Time: 9 minutes Loops are the things that companies do over and over again. Business as usual. Business as boring. Every business has loops. Some are driven by fear, some by tradition, some by distraction, some by lack of awareness or industry convention. Loops affect how we think, how we work, how far we venture and how we […]
Should you scale or should you grow?
Reading Time: < 1 minute In our latest article for Entrepreneur, Pete Canalichio and I explore the different demands of scaling your business vs growing your business. Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses. Each works better in some sectors than others. Each has its own dynamics and makes its own demands. The full article is available here. Hope you […]
Why are so many customer experiences now just marketing sugar?
Reading Time: 13 minutes It’s easy to see why customer experiences have become marketers’ go-to fix. Like content marketing they are such an accepted part of the lexicon today that many marketers have them on their to-do list as a matter of course.
Fears are powerful buying motives. Should we be scared?
Reading Time: 7 minutes Plenty of companies have built their brands on promises based on addressing fears – the needs for protection, for reassurance, for status, for achievement, recognition and so on – in a world where so many of those things are portrayed as being at risk. But how successful is fear as an emotive driver today and […]
18 ways you can systematically succeed as a change maker
Reading Time: 11 minutes Many of us are change makers in one form or another, even if we don’t identify ourselves as such right away. But it’s one thing to advocate for change and quite another to bring that change successfully through to realisation. In complex organisational structures with multiple stakeholders, the make or break, it seems, is socialisation.
The absolute need to challenge (even if you’re not a challenger brand)
Reading Time: 14 minutes Every day, business owners are pitched opportunities to take their brands in a ‘new’ direction or to stay the course—by colleagues, by their agencies, because of the actions of competitors or by delegations of customers or suppliers. When everyone has a tactic and everything is presented as a panacea, how do you sift the wheat […]
How many customer touchpoints do you actually need?
Reading Time: 7 minutes As brands juggle more and more channels to try and interact meaningfully with customers, are all these touchpoints helping or hindering?
This blog is now closed
Reading Time: < 1 minute It’s been a whole lot of fun writing the posts for this Upheavals blog for so many years. I’ve had a blast, and met some great people (many of whom will be forever friends), but everything must come to an end. I can’t see myself travelling or speaking to groups for some time. So I’ve […]