Setting your north star purpose

Reading Time: 6 minutes Keith Yamashita started it – companies and brands finding their northern star. At least, that’s where we first heard it. The term isn’t astronomical, it’s aspirational. Your north star purpose is an ideal of your company or brand that burns bright in front of you and your staff, that leads you on, that fires you […]

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 […]

Nailing your opinions: creating a powerful brand manifesto

Reading Time: 2 minutes On All Saint’s Day 1517, Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses on the door of Castle Church, sparking, in the eyes of many, what would become the Protestant Reformation. Whether or not he actually did post the Theses (of course there is historical debate) and what that generated are off-topic, but the action of pinning […]

Forget USP. Perhaps what your brand really needs is a unique perspective

Reading Time: 4 minutes When Rosser Reeves first proposed the Unique Selling Proposition many decades ago now, the world was a very different place. Products still had the potential to actually be different, advertising was largely confined to mainstream channels and brands were, for the most part, identifiers. But with the evolution of best-practice manufacturing, the fragmentation of channels […]