Feb 23, 2012 | Communication, Sales, Small business
Successful stories are always greater than the sum of their parts.
Great stories engage, enlighten, inform, and inspire, so to dissect the sum to explain the parts may seem easier than selling the whole thing, but it usually does not work. Telling the big picture, the big idea, the big picture, is a key to selling.
Try describing how a frog jumps to someone who has not seen one jump by dissecting it. You can describe the long legs, musculature, power to weight ratio, but that does not help much, better to show them the frog jumping.
Feb 22, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Strategy
Into the new year, most companies that have June 30 as year end will start the tortuous path of setting the new budget. I have seen the budget process take 6 months, and be as useless as a water pistol in a gunfight when it comes to delivering meaningful outcomes.
Two simple questions are often not asked:
- Why are we doing this?
- How are we going to get the outcomes satisfactory to the short term needs of stakeholders, and that also set the business up for long term commercial sustainability?
In other words, have a clear business purpose, and know what you have to do to progressively deliver on the undertakings.
Feb 21, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing
Remember the Arnott’s case, in 1997 they recalled millions of packets, and showed them being crushed on TV, in the days before u-tube. Tylenol in the US went trough the same thing in 1882, 6 packets were laced with cyanide, leading to several deaths, and J&J without hesitation recalled the hundreds of millions of packets in the market, and talked about what had happened, what measures they and the police were taking, and assisted the families of those who had died.
In the new techie world, the same thing applies, 37 Signals has a suite of software products on the cloud, they appear to work well, but when they go down, (every senior managers major concern with the cloud) as it is out of immediate control, it really hurts. 37 signals lost Campfire, but they turned the disaster into gold by communicating.
In most cases where a recall is deemed necessary, it is just a cost, often a huge one, sometimes a terminal one. However, by taking the public into their confidence, a recall, or outage as in the case of Campfire, can be used as powerful evidence that the company puts the welfare of their customers above all else.
Pretty powerful stuff in an environment of bland, commodity brands that have little to differentiate themselves.
Feb 19, 2012 | Communication, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
Just a few months ago, QR codes seemed to me to be the answer to a marketers prayer, a simple way for products and services to connect with anyone with a mobile device, and an interest.
However, Aussies, often quick adapters of technology seemed not to be interested. At a recent wine symposium of a major wine region to which I was lucky enough to score an invitation to, I saw only one brand using QR codes, and yesterday in a major retail outlet, I scoured to the place to find, none. (great excuse eh, just looking for a QR code darling!). This lack of take-up by Australian wineries was a surprise to me, then Joan Muschamp posted on the Social media examiner site, and all became clear.
I thought wineries would rush to QR codes, perhaps the explanation in this article talking about the next big thing, leading to the early death of QR codes, Mobile Visual Search, that we humans are visual animals, and a big bar code does not do it for us, has something in it.
Soon we will be able to point our phone at a building, label, poster, product, whatever, and get immediate feedback on the object. Currently the technology is pretty early stage, Google have started marketing it as “Google Goggles” and Apple has their version as well.
Point is, the pace of innovation is still accelerating, and the opportunities are for the early adopters, the marketers who get on top of a consumer friendly technology early, and leverage it for the brand, by connecting to their content, and telling their stories.
Feb 17, 2012 | Management, Strategy
- Which customers?
- Which markets?
- What is the vale proposition?
- What are the processes that are required to deliver the value proposition?
- What capabilities are required to deliver the strategy?
- What technology is required to deliver the strategy?
- What are the organisational enablers of the strategy?
And most importantly,
- How do we engage our people to participate in the definition of all these, then in the delivery, management, and improvement steps that follow?
Pretty simple really, or how enormously complicated, challenging, and ultimately rewarding, depending on how deeply you think about the list
