Marketing is telling stories.
B2B and B2C is the way marketing has been described for the last 20 years. Nonsense. Marketing when successful has always been P2P, person to person. Successful marketing is about engaging with people and people engage around stories, not data and specifications, and...
One final test.
"If this was your money, would you invest it this way". This question worked well for many years as a corporate executive, asking the question of those who reported to me about the projects for which they were seeking support. Usually, indeed, almost always, the...
8 Moments of truth
Jan Carlzons great 1987 book Moments of Truth reflected on the point at which a "front line" employee interacted with a customer, and how important that interaction was. The digitisation of our lives has profoundly changed the context in which interactions occur, the...
How to be Successful with direct mail
Digital and email marketing is just the C21st version of direct snail-mail. Why is it then that we despair when our email open rates are only 2%, when that is all most direct mail campaigns ever got? I think we are looking at things from the wrong end of the...
Shakespeare invented Twitter!
Willy said many things that have been repeated, and repeated over the years, nuggets of truth that resonate today, may of which have a place in management thinking. "Be great in act, as you are in thought" "In time we hate that which we often fear" "Nothing emboldens...
Toyota’s tent joins Ford and GM in the boot.
As a little kid, the milkman used to deliver from a horse drawn cart. Even then, in the mid fifties it was outmoded, almost rustic, but endlessly engaging for a 5 year old boy. Much later, I was the marketing director of a NSW dairy co-operative as it wrestled...
Pitching an idea
The most powerful way to get someone to agree with your idea is to ask them the leading question, and have them give you the answer you want. Ronald Regan used this technique a lot. He did not tell the American people during his election campaign: “your economic...
StrategyAudit’s second law of SME success
Scaleable. My world is SME's, helping them to be more profitable, more commercially sustainable, more accountable, by being focused on customers and their own processes and priorities. The outcome is that most successfully remain SME's, avoiding the many death traps...
Brand value of SPC and Peters.
If ever you needed convincing that investing for the long haul in a brand was worth the time, energy, risk, and money, there is evidence aplenty in the remnants of the Australian food industry. It has been reported that the Peters Ice Cream brand is on the market,...
Give Charman Stone a medal.
The decision by the federal Government not to support SPC last week has opened a can of worms. This time, the worms have some grunt, as the head worm, Charman Stone has shone a light into the corners of the decision, and in the process, dumped on her party. Thank...