Outside-in innovation
My early days of marketing were as a minor part of the team that created Meadow Lea, the brand that completely changed then dominated the margarine markets for the following 25 years. I was really just a young gopher, but the lessons that came with those successes,...
10 X 8 Framework for a content StrategyAudit
These days with the ubiquity of mobile and social, almost everyone is a media channel. Recognising this simple fact changes the formula for media success. In the old days, the formula used so successfully by mass marketers was: Money X mass media = Sales. This used to...
8 ways to build a hypothesis testing mind set.
The most successful people I have seen over 40 years of business share one crucial characteristic. Curiosity. The successful are insatiably curious, it spans all aspects of their lives, not just the parts that are spent working at what pays the mortgage, but across...
How to build a personal brand
Personal branding seems to be a popular topic around the pub, even the brickie who lives a few streets away, and is not known for his new age sensitivities, has got a hold of it. It is not new, Julius Caesar had a personal brand well before Bill Shakespeare wrote a...
Renting your sales.
Walking into chain retailers these days you are inevitably confronted by displays of product, usually at a discount. Most people seem to think that it is the retailer doing the promotion as a means to attract added sales, which is true, but the reality is that...
Category management steroids
This post goes back to mid 2012. A conversation yesterday with a colleague brought it to mind, as we were discussing the the opportunities to monetise Intellectual Capital of the sort represented by the 1200 odd StrategyAudit posts. "You know more about category...
Organised serendipity
At first sight, "Organised" and "Serendipity" are at opposite ends of the scale, almost mutually exclusive. Serendipity occurs by chance, when the stars align, the unexpected happens and not by any organised process, or so we are led to believe. Organisation by...
Corporate euthanasia
Holden, SPC, Alcoa, Caltex oil, and all the other industrial enterprises that are currently going out of business or leaving the country are doing so because they failed to keep up with the evolution of technology and management practice. Whilst labour costs, the $A,...
3 core questions of strategy.
Often I find myself engaged in conversations with those running small businesses who believe they have discovered the next big thing, the idea that will change the world, or at least their business. It can be as simple as a tweak to an existing product that enables...
The corruption sideshow
The joint is in a mess. Every time you look at the news, there is another "revelation" of dodgy morality, insider dealings, political duck-shoving and just plain corruption. Greed has become the magnet in our moral compass, and to compete, we are all tempted to cut a...