Feb 22, 2010 | Branding, Marketing, Sales, Small business
What will be the continuing impact of the development of housebrands by retailers, and the current heightened value awareness of consumers? Most FMCG suppliers lose sleep over the retailers undermining their profitability by hogging shelf space with far cheaper imitations of their brands, brought to market overnight without much concern about the long term health and development of the category, but delivering short term profitability to them at the expense of their suppliers.
This apparent duplicity, retailers demanding innovation and category building activity from their suppliers, whilst undermining their ability and willingness to invest has to have its limits. Clearly, the old mass market model of branding is over, but what has replaced it?
Increasingly I see the evolution of focused brands and retailers serving the more niche markets, and segments of larger markets where something different is being delivered to customers. Retailers are enabling a new breed of supplier with deep category expertise to emerge at the expense of the older mass market model, and they are in turn fuelling the growth of specialist retailers.
Feb 16, 2010 | Marketing, Small business
What do you do that others cannot?
What enables you to deliver value for a group of customers or potential customers with something in common, which is increasingly nothing to do with demographics, that your competitors cannot match?
Answer those questions, and the rest is pretty easy.
My old mate Louis Marangon at Riverina Grove produces wonderful Italian style products from fresh ingredient sourced as far as possible from around the Riverina region in NSW. Pasta sauces, tapenades, herb infused olives, and other delicacies, almost as if they were from his mothers kitchen. Doesn’t appeal to everyone, and hard to find, but for those who want an authentic Italian inspired product whose provenance is local, know that Louis will break his back to provide it, and they keep on coming back. Thats a CVP with legs, and it is probably the only thing that a small buiness can do as well as, and often better than, because there is less marketing “noise” around, than a large one with substantail financial and personnel resources.
Jan 10, 2010 | Management, Marketing, Small business
In a small business, every action has someone responsible for it, whereas in a large organisation , or worse, a public bureaucracy, nobody has responsibility for the dumb things they do, they just become an automatically imposed “rule” that carries the sanction of the organisation.
Taking responsibility is not just good policy, good for the employees, it is good marketing.
Nov 26, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Small businesses often do not spend the time to develop strategy, agreeing priorities, developing a point of difference, and a plan to execute in the marketplace, and as a result find themselves running harder and harder just to keep up.
Developing a Value Proposition to a defined group of customers is as important to a small business as it is to a large one, perhaps more so as an SME does not normally have the resources to waste on efforts that do offer a return, and they generally have less “fat” in the system to absorb mistakes.
Time spent planning up front always pays dividends in time and resource expenditure down the track.
Nov 25, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Small business
How do you engage with hundreds of people as “friends”?
On a personal level, you may engage deeply with a few, maybe a few dozen, electronically, there may be a group with a specific interest, and you engage with them in a club-type situation, 100 perhaps,150?, but any more and it is not engagement, just some sort of casual interaction, in no way engagement.
The depth of personal relationships simply do not scale.
Our social networking tools have opened new avenues of connection, they are wide, but the width is not a substitute for the depth that can only evolve through a personal connection.
This is one situation where numbers simply do not count, where less is often more, so do not confuse the numbers of contacts with quality of interaction.
Nov 2, 2009 | Change, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing, Small business
We talk about vision, mission, and all the rest, but at a more fundamental level, evolving a point of view, shared throughout the firm, about the “shape” and trends of the industries we are in, and those of the industries we intersect with, is a really basic thing to do.
Having a point of view about the “green” economy enabled GE to start their “Ecomagination” program before climate change was on the general agenda, it enabled them to disrupt their own light bulb business with the compact flouro, and it drives their current efforts to rebuild their huge medical devices business by developing small, cheap, mobile devices that fulfill a more basic need in developing countries .
All this because Jeff Immelt developed a point of view, and drove it through the business as a catalyst for massive and disruptive innovation.
Have you developed a “point of view” about your industry, and the role your business will take? Few are as influential as GE, able to change the “shape” of their industries by their actions, but it is no less important for small firms to have a point of view, and a plan to deal with the “shaping” influences as they emerge.
