Who, or what, is your marketing villain?
Just before Christmas, I was with my son and granddaughter at a 'pantomime' in a local park put on by a local group for the sheer fun of it. All the usual characters of a pantomime, a wise old man, loving mother, young hero, an innocent victim, and a nasty villain in...
The essential B2B inflation busting roadmap
Like it or not, official figures or not, inflation is back with us. Inflation consumes cash like a ravening beast, but often goes unremarked until the 11th hour, by which time it is often too late. Official figures always lag reality, and forecast models...
Why is most current marketing such crap?
We are confronted every day with hundreds, thousands of messages, all competing for our attention. The volume has ramped up exponentially since the net delivered access to anyone with a connection. The vast majority are tactical thought bubbles, cat photos and...
How do you build ‘Institutional Integrity’?
Integrity is something we all say we strive for. Most statements of company values plastered on the reception wall seem to have it included. The dictionary definition is something like: 'the quality of being honest, having strong and unchanging principles'...
What can a Roman slave teach us about strategy?
Consider what has been called: 'The dichotomy of control'. Is this thing I am considering in my control, or not? In the words of Epictetus, a slave who lived early in the first millennium in the time of Nero, and a key figure in the evolution of stoic...
The ever evolving supermarket business model
The supermarket business model, like most others, is evolving as we watch. It is slower in Australia than elsewhere given the challenge of distance and the stranglehold of Coles and Woolies. Nevertheless, it is evolving, and we can learn from elsewhere....
How to generate successful change efforts
For a change effort to succeed, it must solve a problem people care about. The first challenge I have seen in many years of looking, is to find the few who care enough to get off their arses, and then make sure those few care about the same things for the same...
How to win the war on two fronts
History is littered with examples that convincingly make the case that a battle on two fronts can never be won. Our business literature is similarly littered with examples of business failure brought on by the competing demands of too many markets calling on a...
A marketer’s explanation of ‘Box Score’
To improve performance, the key challenge is to identify the drivers of outcomes in real time, and enable the changes to be made that will improve the performance. The 'Box score' is a term that has been hijacked from the recording of individual sporting...
How your data is giving you the wrong answers.
The old adage that you can find data to support any proposition, almost no matter how wild, has never been as prevalent as it is today. We have the sight of politicians on the one hand telling us the science is wrong as it reflects the looming catastrophe of...