Reading Time: 3 minutes A study by Catalina Marketing appears to cast significant doubt over a veritable pillar of media marketing. Demographic targeting, it seems, often falls wide of the mark. Catalina researchers looked at 10 brands targeted at households headed by women ages 25 to 54. They found that, on average, just 15 percent of the ads playing […]
Category: Archive
Story myths
Reading Time: < 1 minute Great brands have great stories. But a great story doesn’t automatically create a great brand. For years we’ve told ourselves a story about what story is and how it works: develop a product; build a story around that product to give it value; sell that product at a greater degree of profit. We’ve allowed ourselves […]
15 reasons why “no-one else has complained”
Reading Time: < 1 minute 1. They didn’t have time 2. They couldn’t be bothered 3. They didn’t want to interact with you a moment longer than they had to 4. They didn’t know how to complain (because you didn’t make it easy) 5. They didn’t feel they could talk to you 6. They didn’t think you could change 7. […]
The strategy of radical beauty
Reading Time: 3 minutes Should you climb a mountain because it’s there, or because you believe you have a more than reasonable chance of conquering it? In a commercial setting at least, I’ll plumb for B – because presence alone is not a rational reason to participate. I continue to be intrigued though by the human instinct to believe […]
Sustainability: Being good, not just doing good
Reading Time: 3 minutes Historically, corporate social responsibility has put the emphasis on how businesses are doing good. It’s become an increasingly varied checklist of “things we’ve done right”. Today though, socially aware audiences want more. They increasingly make judgments about you based on your overall likeability. They want to do business with brands that are good. And that […]
From Prussia with love
Reading Time: 3 minutes Jeremy referred me to this fabulous presentation by Rory Sutherland, and it’s another corker from the man from Ogilvy’s. Mr Sutherland would absolutely make my short list of people to sit next to at dinner. Not only is he an adamant supporter of one of my favourite disciplines, behavioural economics, but his talks are peppered […]
Lessons from an unnoticed violinist
Reading Time: 3 minutes I’ve always loved the story of Joshua Bell playing the Bach pieces largely unnoticed in the Washington metro station. Please watch the video if you don’t know the story. And while the experiment does indeed confirm that we don’t take the time to appreciate as much as we should, more particularly, it’s also a poignant […]
New look for my Upheavals blog
Reading Time: < 1 minute Thought I’d try a new theme. Seems cleaner. Liking it.
How to make sure your company’s next strategy succeeds
Reading Time: 9 minutes Some time back, Charles Roxburgh published a wonderful article for every decision maker responsible for deciding the fate of a proposed strategy. It explored in fascinating detail how the brain tricks leaders into making “rational” decisions that are nothing of the sort. In fact, it revealed that all of us work to a set of […]
Pricing the ecosystem
Reading Time: 3 minutes Take a look at the diagram below courtesy of Ryan Jones (thanks for the point Marc Abraham). It shows how Apple spans its offerings over a surprisingly wide range of price points. By introducing new lines, retaining older lines at degraded prices and through the use of provider subsidies, Apple delivers an impressive range of […]
Actions and reactions: two very different drivers of market agility
Reading Time: 4 minutes By Mark Di Somma Actions and reactions are a strange two-speed dance in the context of market agility. Reactions are the responses that competing companies must actually make together and in a co-ordinated manner to shifts in market dynamics and/or customer expectations. Doing so sets a new norm over which the participants themselves can then […]
Why are you waiting for things to improve? 10 ways for middle-market brands to tackle austerity now
Reading Time: 4 minutes By Mark Di Somma There’s nothing to suggest that the global “downturn” is about to upturn any time soon. We’re in the middle of a sustained bear and nothing in the economic news – America’s debt, China’s slowdown, the flat-footed European economy, Britain’s economic woes, commodity trends – suggests a sudden and universal change of […]