How to calculate a Return on Marketing Investment
Marketers being belted around the ears to produce a marketing budget before June 30 is disturbingly common. It is a clear sign that the marketing group is acting as a co-ordinator of ad hoc activities, rather than being a disciplined, repeatable, and...
The 2 faces of a brand
Marketing and management generally, regularly find themselves actively promoting their branding credentials. Often they would appear to have no idea beyond the mouthing of clichés why they are bothering. The costs of building, maintaining and updating a brand is often...
How to make a workshop work for you.
Last week I ran a workshop that was designed to wrinkle out the options facing a community organisation. It has been successful for many years, but now faces the challenge of significantly changed competitive and social environments since its formation, and the loss...
Required understanding if you are to succeed
Mary Meeker has again produced a report that should be required reading for all who seek to engage with an audience, with the 2016 update of the Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers Internet trends report. Disregard the previous statement. It should not be required reading,...
Another run for a hobby horse
'Account Based Marketing' or ABM is rapidly becoming the latest three letter acronym to which all and sundry seem to be hooking their horses. All sorts of learned crap is being published, assuring me that ABM is the way forward, so I just googled it, 39.5 million...
The greatest failure of marketing management.
The headline is a big call, competing as it does with some real doozies. Remember "New Coke" or the Ford 'Edsel' or perhaps Thomas Watsons declaration that there was a world market of no more than 5 for computers? This one is a general observation on the nature...
The most misused management quote ever
Benjamin Franklin said many worthwhile things, and a few bits on nonsense. However, amongst the best known, and perhaps most quoted is: "If you want something done, give it to a busy person" Absolute bollocks!! Acting on that advice is in my view a failure of...
To Social media or not, that is the question.
Many of the small and medium sized businesses I interact with still struggle with the notion that they should be investing in social media as a marketing strategy. Creating and sharing content of value to their customers, potential customers, and competitors runs...
Anatomy of a successful email
Email is still the most widely used marketing tool out there, and that is for a good reason. It works. Like most, I receive many emails, and having subscribed to all sorts of sites over the years, to see what works and what doesn’t, as well as to get my hands on their...
Are supermarket customers a means to an end, or the end?
Woolworths has delivered in spades to shareholders in the last 20 years, but the rot had set in a decade ago. The seeds of the rot were assisted in my view by a lack of credible competition, and management losing touch with the subtle changes happening in consumer...