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.
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Perspectives
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 […]
Why do demographics matter?
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 […]
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 […]