Stop investing in dead horses.
Investing in dead horses sounds like a pretty dumb idea, but it happens all the time. Projects, ideas, products, people, that have little or no probability of returning revenue and margin from the continuing investment should be stopped. Not only do you save...
Scale or Scope: Australia’s strategic dilemma.
Australia is an economy that has allowed the big to get bigger to such an extent that the barriers to entry in many vital and emerging industries are simply too high for new domestically funded entrants to swallow. This has led to multinationals buying their way...
The referendums failure of basic strategic marketing.
There is a notable omission amongst all the verbiage, finger-pointing, hollow triumphalism, and handwringing emerging after the predicted result of the referendum became a reality. That omission is the failure of marketing, at least by the ‘Yes’ supporters....
Australia’s ‘KAP-Gap’ will kill us!
Australia has a problem, a big one. Our KAP Gap is huge and becoming 'huger' by the month. Knowledge-Attitudes-Practise gap is the difference between what people say they will do, and what they actually do. At some level, we understand what needs to be done,...
Is it Complicated, or just Complex?
These two words are often wrongly used as similes. Complicated implies interdependence, you cannot pull it apart, and then put it back together in exactly the same form. Think of a knitted jumper. Complex implies it can be simplified, much as you unfold a sheet...
Do you market to a person, or a persona?
Being able to market to a 'persona' the picture you build of your ideal customer, is a great leap forward enabled by digital. Our ability to define who buys our products, when, why, where, how, instead of what, and so on. However, there is a flip side....
Are Planning and critical thinking mutually exclusive?
Metrics increasingly drive our commercial lives. We need the metrics to ensure that we are focused on the outcome, it drives the resource allocation choices that must be made. Usually, we face a series of binary choices, do A or B, then X or Y. This is...
How to build personal Intuition
Intuition is widely misunderstood, often it is seen as a ‘gift’, a rare ability to generate ‘insight’ into a situation. Over my long commercial life, I have come to a different conclusion. Intuition can be generated and managed when it is recognised that it is...
9 ‘Local’ marketing strategies.
Many of my clients are SME’s whose businesses are localised in some way, usually to the boundaries of the city they are in. The budgets they have for marketing are limited, so they must make every dollar count. A very common and deadly mistake they make is to...
A marketers explanation of DIFOT, and its difficult sibling.
When you want to improve something, find a metric that drives the performance you want. Pretty obvious, as most of us subscribe to the cliché that you get what you measure, while remembering Einstein's observation that not all that matters can be measured....