Aug 31, 2009 | Leadership, Marketing
Isn’t the marketing job done by the Canterbury Bulldogs on Hazem El Nasri about the best branding game in town at the moment?
Forget that he is an athlete, and that his personal credo appears to be beyond reproach, Canterbury have done a great job of branding for the man, the club, and the game after a low period that has called into question the survival of the game as the main football code in this part of the world.
There are many alternatives to league, all of them competing for the hearts and minds of players, supporters, sponsors, and perhaps most importantly, young players mums. Their concerns have been adroitly addressed by the brand strategists who have executed beautifully over the last 6 months, culminating last weekend.
It would have been a perfect finish had the young bookend been sufficiently marketing savvy to have passed to Hazem 3 minutes from the end, with the line open, rather than taking the try himself. What an opportunity missed!
Professional marketers spend their lives looking for sources of competitive advantage, then building and defending them. They use the quantitative tools that identify segments, targets, strategies and opportunities, but to be successful they must not forget that marketing is more about the heart than the head, but you need both.
Those who carried this exercise got it right, recognising that marketing is a science, except where it is an art.
Aug 27, 2009 | Innovation, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
The world will look different when it emerges from the crunch, as we appear to be doing currently.
The globalization and connectivity of the world are trends that will not go away, and the chaos of the last 12 months will have enabled trends at the fringe to build momentum much more quickly that would have otherwise been the case.
Consider the acceptance, even demand, for increased government intervention in business, something that would have been impossible a year ago, the growth of twitter over the same period, the role pro-active networking of supporters using the web played in the success of the Obama campaign, and the explosion of sales of “green” cars like the Toyota Prius, and Honda’s equivalent at premium prices during a financial meltdown. All examples of disturbance at the periphery of activity which became full blown disruptions at the core in a very short time, motivated during the economic chaos by people seeking new ways to understand and deal with what was going on.
Building adaptability has become a key survival skill, taking lessons from the natural world where many small “experiments” at the fringes builds the capacity of the species to survive as the environment changes around you. It may be that Peter Drucker‘s maxim that the only core competence needed by an organization was innovation has been reinforced, as all the literature on successful innovation cites the ability of an organization to run many experiments as a key component of innovation success.
Anyone thinking the post crash world will look like the pre-crash one needs to think again.
Aug 26, 2009 | Leadership, Management, Strategy
Management activity often seems to be telling people what to do, then fighting the fires when it is not done, or not done to a standard you deem acceptable, or not done on time.
A simple human reaction: “tell me what to do, and I will do it, but if you do not tell me what to do, how do I know I have to do it”?
A simple solution, hard to implement because you need to change first: stop telling people what to do which takes away their responsibly and ownership, and start encouraging them to take ownership of problems and propose solutions they then become responsible for implementing.
Management starts with helping people see problems, and making sure they have the skills, resources and motivation to fix them, and then it becomes leadership.
Taking the easy way out and doing it yourself sometimes appears the easiest solution, but it is rarely one that is the best solution, it is just a short term band-aid on a symptom, rarely a solution.
Aug 25, 2009 | Management, Strategy
Having a good strategy scores 1/10 on the useful meter, the other 9/10 are allocated for implementation, adjustment, and learning.
That is not to down-play the difficulty of developing a good strategy, and the crucial value of such an investment of resources, it is time consuming, demanding, and usually highly iterative, combining both data and judgment in ways that deliver a competitive advantage.
However, no matter how smart the strategy, the key to success is the implementation. I wonder how many great strategies have been developed, bound, and presented, only to grace the shelf, pristine in its pride of place.
There are many tools to assist the development process, SWOT, Porters 5 forces, Balanced Scorecard, and many others, but the number of tools available has had little impact on the quality of the implementation process in most businesses.
However, the key to strategic success is to be determined to implement and measure the effectiveness of the implementation of strategic decisions taken, and being prepared to make alterations as new information emerges, or competitive conditions change.
Aug 24, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Sales
At an industry round table a short time ago, a general conversation was bouncing around amongst a bunch of relatively senior executives about the uses their businesses had made of the internet as a marketing and communication tool.
Few were vocal advocates of the web, several had examples of fancy programs that yielded little for their businesses.
It became clear after a while that they largely saw the net as a way of avoiding the mailing costs, printing, envelope stuffing, and stamps, associated with “direct mail” and were grateful, but it did not work very well.
Memo:
The net is not just free stamps, it is a whole new way of engaging your market, of attracting and engaging a new bunch of people, probably who were never going to be on a mailing list, because they engage each other, they network with like minded people. The power is taken from you, and given to them.
Seeing this as a version of a snail mail direct mail program is really missing the point completely. The net is nothing like a free mailing service, it is a new way of working with your “tribe” rather than directing them.
