Cash flow as the lifeblood is only half a metaphor.
Cash flow is often described as the lifeblood of a business. While it is correct, it leaves a lot on the table. If cash flow is the lifeblood, you also need a heart to pump it around the body. The leaner and more efficient the body in which the heart...
Have Covid and AI been extreme Darwinian catalysts to change?
Covid was a Darwinian catalyst, at least in my view. A decade of slow change was supercharged into 6 months as businesses, institutions, and individuals, struggled with the need to change rapidly, and radically. It also unleashed an unprecedented...
How much has marketing really changed?
If you asked a room full of marketers if marketing had changed in the last decade, you would get most of them telling you it had changed radically. On the surface it has, the digital revolution has taken marketing by the neck and given it a great big...
Will Generative AI replace people?
The astonishing ability of the new AI tools to increase productivity relies on being able to 'learn' by mining pools of data, then detecting and projecting responses based on statistical outcomes of that mining. The next step, Generative AI, Generative...
Yesterday’s fish wrapper?
Blog posts live on, as does anything posted to the net. Sometimes they come back to bite us, sometimes they merge from a long hibernation to live again. Last thing you want is for that Facebook photo from that wild party at university to emerge a decade...
4 hurdles to successful ‘digitisation’
Often, I hear the term 'Digital Strategy' used as if it were an end result, some discrete set of activities to be completed. To my mind, this is a misuse of the term. As it is usually used, 'Digital’ is all about the devices, the technology, whereas the value in...
Trust: Is it the antidote to AI fakery?
AI can put words in the mouth of any public figure and make it virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. It can create pictures that even experts cannot pick as digital facsimiles. How can we trust anything we see or hear? To date we have been...
Is Taylor Swift the greatest marketer of the last 20 years?
There are many contenders from around the globe for the mantle of 'GOAT", or at least of the last 20 years. The obvious choice might be Steve Jobs, whose single-minded pursuit of all the factors that coalesce into great, long lasting, and commercially...
4 crucial questions to unlock the power of your advertising.
Last week I provided a template for a Customer Value Proposition. The template works well, but 'Customer Value Proposition' is a piece of marketing jargon which just means making a promise to your customers. This presupposes that you actually know who...
A simple template for a killer Value Proposition
Almost everyone has trouble with this most basic of marketing jobs, articulating your 'Value Proposition'. It is a simple statement of the benefit a customer gets from using your product, rather than an alternative. Internally it also plays a role, in aligning...