How to get to know the things you do not know.
Some pretty smart people say some pretty dumb (with hindsight) things. “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Patent Office has been widely credited with this quote in 1899. He may not have said it, but it was...
How to write a position statement
Over the years I have seen hundreds, probably thousands of statements of various kinds intended to position a company, product, opportunity, and most are crap. As a marketing graduate decades ago, in one of my first challenging situations, an interview for a job I...
Evolution and its intersection with digital.
It is fascinating to observe human behavior. Of great interest to me is the intersection with the practices evolving to deal with the digital world, manifested in all sorts of unexpected ways. One is the huge range of digital tools now available using the so...
Hindsight planning: More than a semantic difference.
All sorts of planning activity is aimed at defining the point where we want to be, then assembling the resources and capabilities to get there. That is how planning is done, almost always, because by and large, it seems to work, and it keeps the...
Transaction cost. The least understood cost in business:
This post is the sixth in the series that sets out the means by which small businesses can take advantage of their small scale, and be successful competing against the industry giants for expensive supermarket shelf space. Remove transaction costs. Easy to say, hard...
How to build an effective Marketing funnel
Creating a marketing funnel is the basis of all digital marketing initiatives. If you put the term into google, you get back 3 million plus responses, many of them having nice illustrations attached that in one way or another, look like a funnel, with stages and...
8 Things you do not say to a supermarket buyer when launching a new product.
Gaining distribution in supermarkets is really hard, and more to the point, expensive. Supermarkets control the key "choke point" between you as a supplier, and consumers. On occasions when you are pitching a "me too" product, a decision just comes down to the...
69 Questions to be answered before a website designer starts.
Often I find myself working with a small business to specify a website and digital strategy, and sometimes I am actually taking a brief for a website design. Either way, the same questions keep popping up, so I thought it sensible to list them down. For some unknown...
Three things all small businesses need to succeed
Over 20 years of working with mostly small and medium businesses, I have found there are three common factors that are almost always are pre-requisites to a successful business, generally in this order: Cash. Cash is the lifeblood of business, and too often small...
Suppliers to Supermarkets have two customer types.
This post is the 5th in the series, how to beat the supermarket gorillas at their game. Like David taking on Goliath, small businesses supplying into FMCG (Fast moving Consumer Goods) markets simply have to find the points where they can exert some leverage, where...