The strongest brands are more like “movements” of like minded, usually passionate individuals, people to whom a brand has an emotional connection for some reason, it is much more personal than a demographic and socio-economic expression of “sameness” of the individuals.
I cannot think of a successful brand built without passion, and there is nothing as contagious as a dose of passion, so successful marketing becomes an exercise in spreading the passion.
Supply or Value chains are essentially sequential, one activity logically follows the completion of the one prior, and in streamlining the timing and handover parts of a process, you can build great efficiency.
However, great leaps in performance will not come from incremental improvement in a sequential process, but from finding ways to complete activities in parallel, but this will require a whole different set of collaboration tools, to ensure that each parallel activity is working towards the same end point, using information that is consistent and complementary.
The exchange of information through the chain becomes absolutely essential as you move to reduce the cycle time and costs of activity sets in a chain by re-engineering the chain to progressively adopt parallel activities. Without essential information being far more freely available that is necessary in a sequential chain situation the whole exercise will be a disaster.
Simple first steps taken to “parallel process” can offer great improvement, but more importantly, they can be an indicator of what is possible, and a precursor of the sorts of information sharing capabilities that will be necessary to capture the promised performance improvements.
A vexed question, and managing customer profitability is as fundamental as managing the P&L, but possibly more complicated.
It is usually unrealistic to measure the profitability of all customers, but most businesses live by the 80/20 rule, so concentrate on the 20, and apply the knowledge gained to the remaining 80, with appropriate caution. Several parameters should be measured, the more the better, in order of importance:
Measuring customer profitability is a key part of a program of pro-actively managing the investment most businesses make in servicing their customers, but is too often allowed to drift.
A complication is that customers that have the potential to be amongst your top customers have to start somewhere, so the manner in which you measure profitability must be sufficiently flexible and responsive to recognise those that are currently not amongst your top customers, but are nevertheless “key” customers in your planning processes, and for your future.
Making choices is the stock in trade of any manager, so following are a few questions you can reasonably ask yourself that will force you to consider some of the basic choices every business needs to ask itself.
Pretty simple really, but how often are you doing something not connected in any way to the answers to any of these questions?
Business is simple, produce something and sell it at greater than your cost, and you will make a profit, the complication is when you add people who do not buy into the answers to the three questions to the mix.
These terms are often used interchangeably, often in my experience muddying the waters in situations where clarity is required.
Efficiency is all about how well you use the status quo, productivity is more about how you leverage gains to be made from changing the status quo.
Controlling costs of a process (efficiency) is far easier than figuring out how to make the process better (productivity), and in the long run is nowhere near as useful.