Reading Time: 3 minutes Dunkin’ Donuts has announced that it is dropping the ‘Donuts’ part of its name in selected stores in order to highlight there’s more to the brand than the products it’s synonymous with. But when you’re this well known, is changing your brand name a smart move?
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Perspectives
Here’s why creating customer value is so hard
Reading Time: 8 minutes Customer value is one of the most talked about aspects of marketing today, but many senior decision makers are hard pushed to articulate how exactly their business is creating meaningful customer value and how that tangibly contributes to their business being more valuable and competitive. Even if they can put that into words, a powerful […]
Why branding experts need to step out of their silos
Reading Time: < 1 minute In our latest article at Entrepreneur, Pete Canalichio and I examine why now, more than ever, the marketing consulting industry should be promoting an interactive brand ecosystem that more closely aligns the disciplines of brand insights, brand strategy, brand protection, brand licensing and brand valuation. The full article is available here. Hope you enjoy it. […]
How to excel as a business storyteller, now that everyone’s doing it
Reading Time: 8 minutes Stories are now such a *thing* even in a B2B context that it’s easy to think that every marketer can and should be a business storyteller. Effective business storytelling though is harder than it looks. If you back yourselves to tell an extraordinary story that the people who buy from you will want to specifically […]
How come it’s cool now to hate on strategy?
Reading Time: 8 minutes I read recently that less than one third of businesses undertake regular customer research. They don’t feel they have the time or the budget it seems to wait for answers, and they don’t see the value in doing so. They prefer to trust their own perceptions and experiences. They’re drawn to action plans.
Why some innovative ideas work, and most don’t
Reading Time: 10 minutes We hear a lot about how fast and how much the world is moving. But when companies pursue innovative ideas to cater to what they think is consumers’ fascination with the new and shiny, reactions can be mixed. The trap for marketers in this is that there are different types of “newness”: from the ‘new’ […]
Can broad differentiation strategy make all the difference?
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.
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.