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 […]
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Perspectives
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 […]
Shifting brand responsibility
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 […]
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 […]