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Brands shouldnt try to make sense
The flipside of a marketplace where brands encourage people to buy for emotive reasons is that brands also need to counter consumers personal reasons not to buy. Some of these reasons may be legacy....
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Is behavioural change in a corporate culture all about timing?
Is this the right time to change? may not be the delaying question I often dismiss it as. To see why, read Carolines post at the Optimal Usability blog (subscribed to, not surprisingly, by the ever...
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Is your brand ready for the experience war?
Thanks to Cato who once again this year kindly invited me to the Wellington simulcast of the AG Ideas Business Breakfast held in Melbourne yesterday. The theme for the AG Ideas 2012 Business Breakfast...
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Brand dynamics: the shapeshifting of brand likeability
Our traditional view of product preference has for many years mirrored our view of markets. A bell curve, where products rise in popularity over time, sustain leadership through a period of maturity...
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The portfolio approach to strategy
How do you drive home a strategy to fulfil your future, when everything around you is changing?The secret, according to McKinsey & Co senior advisor, Eric D. Beinhocker, is to radically review what...
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Is the digital economy actually an economy (yet)?
Some years ago, I wrote a post that took Chris Andersons freemium model to task. In it I argued that once you had provided services and information freely, the conversion to payment was going to be...
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Retail brands: price always has a context
Marianne Bickle takes JC Penneys to task over their pricing strategy in this pithy and thought-provoking post in Forbes. In it, she argues that the retailing icon misread the market in key ways and...
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Affirmation: how to make a brand experience really count
Everybody wants to feel they got value for money. Sure but when exactly does something feel like it was worth it? For example, Lady Gagas just wound up a three concert stint in Auckland. When does...
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Not a problem: success pivots on what you solve, not just what you know
If youre not a fan yet of the Scattershot blog, then Id like to suggest you should be. In a post published earlier this week, Rajant discusses the concept of ground truth. Ground truth, as its name...
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Handpicked the wider implications of curation
The first time I really thought about the role of an astute retailer was while watching Mary Portas. Her point: any retailer can stock. Smart and profitable retailers, by contrast, handpick items that...
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Why we all still love (and hate) ads
It’s the next thing out of most people’s mouths the moment I tell them I work in marketing. They hate ads, there are too many of them, and who’s got time to watch television or read mainstream media...
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What can happen when you change your brand name
Recently, Dunkin’ Donuts announced that it was looking at 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...
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Here’s why creating customer value is so hard
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...
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Why branding experts need to step out of their silos
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...
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How to excel at business storytelling, now that everyone’s doing it
Stories are now such a *thing* even in a B2B context that it’s easy to think that corporate or brand storytelling is just something every marketer can do and should be doing. Effective business...
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How come it’s cool now to hate on strategy?
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...
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Why some innovative ideas work, and most don’t
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...
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Differentiation strategy: how to fight the depressing slide towards sameness
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...
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How to unthink your way to astonishing innovation
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...
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Should you scale or should you grow?
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...
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