Reading Time: 4 minutes Some years ago, I wrote a post that took Chris Anderson’s “freemium” model to task. In it I argued that once you had provided services and information freely, the conversion to payment was going to be a lot tougher. Free, I suggested, would become an implicit entitlement. Last week, in a withering attack in the […]
Category: Archive
Retail brands: price always has a context
Reading Time: 4 minutes Marianne Bickle takes JC Penney’s to task over their pricing strategy in this pithy and thought-provoking post in Forbes. In it, she argues that the retailing icon misread the market in key ways and compromised its value proposition when it replaced its famous coupon and discounts pricing strategy with a policy that stressed continuity, consistency […]
Affirmation: how to make a brand experience really count
Reading Time: 2 minutes Everybody wants to feel they got value for money. Sure – but when exactly does something feel like it was “worth it”? At what point or points does a brand experience gain that sense of affirmation for a customer? What role does affirmation play in winning the burgeoning brand experience war?
Not a problem: success pivots on what you solve, not just what you know
Reading Time: 3 minutes If you’re not a fan yet of the Scattershot blog, then I’d like to suggest you should be. In a post published earlier this week, Rajant discusses the concept of “ground truth”. Ground truth, as its name suggests, is the view on the ground that verifies and informs the satellite view. It’s a great way […]
The one question every market leader should ask
Reading Time: < 1 minute Two thoughts that I really like, brought together to create a powerful and competitive question.
Does my brand look big in this?
Reading Time: 3 minutes As marketers, we’re often encouraged to puff up our brands to look as big as possible so that they appear significant and credible in a global marketplace. There’s a sense that if you’re big, you must be successful and if you’re successful, then there’s a higher than likely chance that you’ll continue to grow. Size […]
The great customer vanishing act: what happens when you can’t track them?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Right now, many social brands offer a free ride in exchange for data that they hope will be valuable to their marketers and others.
The new role of marketing
Reading Time: 4 minutes The reason why companies have worked photocopy business plans for so long is because they never thought to work any other way. It just seemed too risky. The rise and rise of producer nations, in the words of Michael Porter, “rivetted attention on implementation”. Watching Japan, then China and India continue to progress, many companies […]
Strategy: 11 ways to purposefully achieve growth
Reading Time: 2 minutes You can’t build a sustainably purposeful culture it seems to me without having a deliberately purposeful strategy. Part of the problem of course is that, traditionally, strategy and purpose have lived in different parts of the organisation. My suggestion is that they shouldn’t, and that instead of simply allocating purpose to culture and strategy to […]
Market adjacency – have you asked the two key questions?
Reading Time: 6 minutes The model for achieving ambitious growth is well documented: a combination of organic and inorganic growth that sees companies looking to gain market share at the expense of their competitors in markets they already occupy, as well as looking for inorganic growth through an adjacent market strategy and/or prospecting for high-return greenfields markets beyond that. […]
Maintaining brand loyalty: 4 ways brands get it wrong
Reading Time: 4 minutes Most good marketers know how to gain top of mind. Good marketers are adept at widening the funnel at the top end. They’ve good at introducing new lines, new variants, new dimensions – in order to attract new customers. They know how to work with their agencies and their internal teams to fashion a story […]
Market leadership: why innovation needs to engage, not just impress
Reading Time: 3 minutes Blair points me in the direction of Booz & Company’s 2011 Global Innovation 1000 for some interesting insights as to why innovation works for some and not for others. (Thanks Blair.) According to Booz & Co, innovation spending increased in 2011 to $1.15 trillion globally. The 1000 companies that Booz & Co surveyed represented almost half […]