Reading Time: 2 minutes By Mark Di Somma Let me make a suggestion to brand owners in the interests not just of transparency but of greater consumer belief. Stop communicating your efforts in sustainability, diversity, traceability, environmental contribution, fair trade etc as corporate social responsibility obligations. Instead, act on them, and account for them, as differentiating inclinations. And frame […]
Category: Archive
Seeing past the problem
Reading Time: 2 minutes By Mark Di Somma Every transformation programme I have ever worked on has been set in motion by a problem. And in every case the issue that has galvinised action and that everyone is so focused on answering is not the real problem at all. As Simon Sinek has observed, people intuitively deal with what […]
Familiarity 2.0 is driving brand community
Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s easy to underestimate the huge changes that have taken place in the dynamics of the brand-customer relationship in recent years. Brands and consumers are now engaged at whole new levels of familiarity. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn et al haven’t just brought people closer, they have enabled entirely new types of brand community to evolve and […]
The first thing to look for in any pitch situation is the intention
Reading Time: 4 minutes By Mark Di Somma So you’ve been asked to pitch for some business. The most natural thing in the world is to focus on your intentions – whether you want to pitch, how much resource you’re prepared to throw at it, the timing, the deliverables … What often goes unasked (and unanswered) is why the […]
How do you keep the magic? 7 ways big companies get it so wrong with long-term customers
Reading Time: 4 minutes By Mark Di Somma Everyone talks at length about customer engagement and the need to converse. The process is relatively straight-forward for high-street brands. They use the seasons, sales and releases to keep people coming back. There are timely prompts. But how do you keep customers engaged when they’re on a contract, for example, that […]
Purpose vs vision and mission
Reading Time: 2 minutes I hope the days of vision and mission statements are nearly over. They’re the paperwork of traditional management models. They’re strategic compliance, and as such, they get deliberated over at great length and then forgotten. For the most part, they’re also self-centred – all about what the organisation wants to achieve for itself, all about […]
Can you innovate too quickly?
Reading Time: 3 minutes What is the right pace for a brand to transform in an iterative economy? So often we’re told that success will stem from pushing the innovation accelerator flat to the floor. As proof, we hear about those companies that failed to innovate or didn’t respond quickly enough – and were buried. But is that true? […]
30 things likeable brands do
Reading Time: 4 minutes Being likeable is not about being liked by everyone. Likeable brands actually need to be very clear about who likes them and why and how they need to behave in order to continue to appeal to their community. 10 ways to build a truly likeable brand states the principles of likeability and is one of […]
How do you write a great purpose?
Reading Time: 3 minutes A sizzling purpose sets out how a company intends to change the world for the better. Its role is to unite customers and culture alike in the pursuit of that intention. It’s a statement of belief, of hope, of pursuit. It’s born of a wish to see the world put to rights. Having fielded a […]
What do you have: a brand or an identifier?
Reading Time: 2 minutes Identifiers may look like brands but in reality they have just a small part of what it takes to be a true brand. Here are six reasons why brands need to be more than identifiers.
Every pitch is a story
Reading Time: 3 minutes The purpose of a pitch is not to sell what you do. It’s to explain in the clearest terms why someone should look forward to doing business with you. Don’t pitch to your prospect’s greatest wish. They already know that. Pitch to their greatest fear. Tell them the story of how you will help them […]
The new traceability
Reading Time: 2 minutes Affordable “beef” that’s actually made of horse. Professional athletes who haven’t won what they’ve won legally. Acclaimed investors who turn out to be running Ponzi schemes … The great threat to claiming achievements going forward isn’t credibility. It’s incredulity. It’s disbelief that what one sees, that what has apparently happened, is true. It’s nagging scepticism […]