Sep 23, 2009 | Marketing
Green marketing, Eco marketing, carbon aware marketing, food miles marketing, Cause marketing, all are segments of “marketing” that have potential appeal to an “aware” group of consumers that just a few years ago would have been lumped together, and considered to be “tree huggers” or “loonies.”
Reaching these small but committed groups of consumers, and engaging with them is not possible in any cost effective way with mass media, it requires the communication tools of the 21st century to engage with, and be relevant to the emerging consumers of the 21st century.
It has always been the case that individuals were all different, it is just that branding evolved as a means to communicate to similar “masses” in the absence of being able to communicate with individuals about what made them an individual, a market of one.
Nothing has changed except the tools.
Sep 22, 2009 | Management
Seth Godin a short time ago wrote a post on priorities, goes to the heart of the dilemma we all face, sorting our own version of The priority list .
Then Tom Fishburne reflects Seths observations in one picture.
What more needs to be said, or drawn?
Sep 22, 2009 | Change, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
There is a growing trend driven by the difficult times for management to set very big goals (Big Hairy Audacious Goals… BHAG),and hope to create the focus necessary to achieve the BHAG outcome.
Often however, the opposite appears to occur, as those in the organization charged with the execution of the plans simply do not believe the objectives are achievable.
Sometimes this is just that the objective is divorced from the reality of the competitive environment, sometimes it is simply a failure of leadership, but most often, it is just that the goals emerge from wishful thinking that puts off difficult decisions for a bit longer.
JFK said in 1961 “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to earth. ” This is probably the most famous BHAG of all. It is a statement in a single sentence that contains the three elements of a successful BHAG. It creates the vision of where we want to go, the measures of success are clearly articulated, and everyone recognised the resources necessary to achieve the task would be made available, because the President had committed himself to the goal.
No room for wishful thinking or bland leadership in that statement, and it was achieved. Would it have been achieved, had any of the three conditions been missed? Probably not, because it would have just been the wishful musings of the President.
Sep 20, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Strategy
Modeling scenarios has become a pretty big business, but notice that you often get only the numbers out of the end of the model, rarely the assumptions that drive the outcomes, and rarely a range of options.
This has been brought home again as I read the “strategic plan” completed at great expense on behalf of an industry body that covers a wide range of individual sub industries, each with their own characteristics and issues, albeit with some common drivers such as water availability, labour availability and capital generation.
Consultants at great expense produced a model that churned out numbers supposed to show the way forward, but which common sense says has a lot of dodgy assumptions going in, because what is coming out is unusable by any of the individual enterprises in the industries, or the industry bodies supposed to assist them.
Most commercial models I see set out to prove a point of view, and that point of view usually aligns with some preconceived notion of what the outcome should be. In this above case, the outcome was driven by the consultants need to tell the industry body what they wanted, not necessarily what they needed to know.
Scientific method by contrast works in the opposite way, it sets out to disprove a hypothesis, and by that means, advance our knowledge a bit, as you reconsider the hypotheses on the basis on one more thing you know does not work.
Bit more time consuming, but outcomes that are untainted by an existing perspective.
Numbers are only as good as the assumptions that drive them, so next time you are given an argument backed by numbers, don’t look at the numbers, have someone explain and debate the assumptions that have driven them.
Sep 16, 2009 | Change, Innovation
Aggressive defense of the status quo by powerful firms, or a consortia of firms in some sort of industry lobby body often indicates a fat profit plum ripe for the plucking, or a closed shop that protects inefficiency. Perhaps they are the same thing.
Look at the defense of the record industry against the digital music revolution, the aggressive defense of the pharmacy drug (legal) distribution monopoly, the newspaper distribution monopoly (would you buy a newsagency now with the e-distribution of news taking over?) and the artificially high entry barriers imposed on new entrants to many professional bodies and you will see potential profit in the breaking down of the status quo, which protects someones easy life.
Usually, everyone apart from the defenders benefit when these strong guardians of yesterday are wiped away, as they usually are, with a greater level of pain than would be incurred if there was a sensible and creative discussion about alternative models.
In the end, all the lobbying does is create added waste and pain, and the chance to protect the profits of incumbency by innovation, and evolving the business model to better serve customers is lost in the determination to protect the status quo.
