Trust: Is it the antidote to AI fakery?
AI can put words in the mouth of any public figure and make it virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. It can create pictures that even experts cannot pick as digital facsimiles. How can we trust anything we see or hear? To date we have been...
Is Taylor Swift the greatest marketer of the last 20 years?
There are many contenders from around the globe for the mantle of 'GOAT", or at least of the last 20 years. The obvious choice might be Steve Jobs, whose single-minded pursuit of all the factors that coalesce into great, long lasting, and commercially...
4 crucial questions to unlock the power of your advertising.
Last week I provided a template for a Customer Value Proposition. The template works well, but 'Customer Value Proposition' is a piece of marketing jargon which just means making a promise to your customers. This presupposes that you actually know who...
A simple template for a killer Value Proposition
Almost everyone has trouble with this most basic of marketing jobs, articulating your 'Value Proposition'. It is a simple statement of the benefit a customer gets from using your product, rather than an alternative. Internally it also plays a role, in aligning...
A better way to segment your customer base.
Every customer segmentation exercise I have ever seen is based on geography, demographics, some combination of behavioural characteristics, or all of the foregoing. 'Young women, 25-35, single, who live in the Eastern suburbs, earn more than 80k, and eat out a...
Revolution by digital: A survival necessity.
'Going digital' sounds easy. Sadly, it is not. Almost every company I visit or work with needs, to one degree or another to be aggressively moving down the path towards 'digitisation'. Just what does 'digitisation' mean? For most of my clients it means...
Australia Day 2024. Here we go again.
January 26 again, and out come the strident calls for it to be changed, in one of many ways, as well as the equally strident voices calling for no change. To me it seems to be just nonsensical chatter. In any event, January 26 is a confection. Prior to 1935 it...
What should be the word for 2024?
Tempo. Everything in life has some sort of tempo to it. The change of the seasons, the cycles of our lives, the routines we follow often without thought, and the planning/execution cycles in our public, private and business lives. What has changed dramatically...
The two most important words in strategy.
Imagine. Possibilities. 'Strategic thinking' has been overtaken by the 'quants'. Those that believe that by generating loads of data, analysing past events, behaviour, and outcomes, you can create a model that will give answers to the key strategic question:...
6 words that drove a career.
'Do not ever patronise me again.’ Those words are seared onto my brain, coming from the mouth of a new boss many years ago. I had not long been employed and wanted to make an impression. Therefore, every conversation was a combative one, a conversation I set...