Reading Time: 2 minutes Transformation isn’t about plotting a meeting point for your brand with the predicted future. It’s not about getting to where the puck will be, to paraphrase Wayne Gretsky. Because depending on the arrival of the next big thing or that breaking wave, that hot new trend, the long-awaited demographic or anything else for that matter […]
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Perspectives
How do you prevent your corporate culture from stalling?
Reading Time: 5 minutes There is plenty of discussion, quite rightly, about the fact that people are overworked, that they are under ridiculous pressure, that they feel undervalued and unmotivated – but a couple of conversations this week have got me wondering whether the opposite, an unpressured culture, whilst not as destructive, may nevertheless be undesirable, albeit for different […]
Which story will they tell? 9 possibilities for pitch stories
Reading Time: 4 minutes As I explained in this post, 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. And while you’re explaining your story, you can bet that every other participant in the pitch will be telling theirs. […]
Brands as operating systems
Reading Time: 2 minutes In this post, Nigel Hollis explores a fundamental misalignment. Brand owners tend to view customer experiences in isolation, by channel, whereas customers of course view and grade their experiences cumulatively. Tom Asacker captures why customers think this way. A brand, he says, is “one, interdependent system of behavior”. The problem is that in too many […]
Where do you stand on fair pricing? A conversation starter
Reading Time: 3 minutes Buyers have convinced themselves that they are entitled to deprive brands and shopkeepers of a degree of the asking price profit in the hunt for a bargain – yet in almost the same breath, they’ll tell you that businesses need to be responsible and to behave ethically and that they shouldn’t take shortcuts that compromise […]
Don’t plan to be a start-up. Plan to be an upstart.
Reading Time: 2 minutes By Mark Di Somma You should never start a business unless you are deliberately planning for others in the industry to be dismayed, surprised, outraged or alarmed by what you are doing. “Start-up” has become a synonym for starting-out. It implies not just being at the beginning, but needing to catch up to someone more […]
CSR: aligning corporate purpose and social responsibility
Reading Time: 4 minutes It is said that CSR is how companies build their reputation and contribute to helping the world. Cynics suggest that CSR has sprung from a need by corporates to justify what they were doing to the world. Either way, it’s failed to turn things around so far: CSR hasn’t made a material difference to global […]
Forget supply and demand. Think supply and desire.
Reading Time: 3 minutes According to mainstream marketing theory, price is decided by supply and demand and fluctuates accordingly. In today’s market however, pricing is increasingly about supply and desire. The rules of volatility have changed. The upgrade culture, shorter product lifetimes and highly efficient distribution chains have flattened the gaps between supply and demand in so many sectors, […]
Brand management: The dangers of yes, no and clothing the Emperor.
Reading Time: 3 minutes People buy brands, not managers. And yet think about the number of managers who make judgment calls, sometimes very big judgment calls, based on their own opinions and experiences? They feel comfortable because they are expressing views and making decisions that fit with their worldview. But that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily doing the brand justice, […]
Words always have a wider context
Reading Time: 2 minutes [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzgzim5m7oU] Perhaps you’ve seen this video about the power of words, perhaps not. The storyline itself may have been attributed to David Ogilvy, nevertheless, it is a powerful story that offers critical insights into how we should think about words and their influence in this age of storytelling. The clear intention is to demonstrate that […]
30 things you should tell employees before you change the culture
Reading Time: 2 minutes By Mark Di Somma What sort of information should decision makers share with employees as an organisation prepares to go through a significant cultural shift? These are my thoughts sized in digestible chunks. Order of course may vary. 1. The future that we now see for the organisation 2. How we discovered that we […]
You’re not just pitching to win the business (you’re there to decide if you want the business)
Reading Time: 2 minutes The purpose of a face-to-face pitch is only partly to make the case for why you should be hired. The other part, the bigger part in my view, is that you’re looking to see behind the corporate face and to gauge the likelihood for mutual respect and profitability. Reciprocity. And in that sense, a pitch […]