How to herd cats.
Everyone knows herding cats is impossible, right? Quite often this is a metaphor used to apply to NGO's and voluntary organisations, bureaucracies, particularly local government, farmers, and children. Getting them to one place, at one time, in an organised and...
3 questions to apply “Lean” to social media.
Lean thinking is well established in manufacturing and office operations, but social media? Hardly? Lean thinking is all about the removal of anything that does not add value to the customer. So, if we extend this a bit to potential customers as well, given that ...
Crying for a Lean agricultural demand chain
Lean thinking, evolving from the Toyota Production System is changing manufacturing world, but agriculture has a long way to go. Just as building cars used to be a production oriented operation until Toyota turned it on its head, so too is agriculture production led....
Balance of marketing power
It used to be that marketing power was held in the hands of those with the most money to spend, so could block buy TV, magazines and radio. News flash! Those days are gone. Marketing power is now held by three groups: Those with imagination, Those with bravery....
Narcissistic branding and politics
Spending marketing resources to build a brand all about you when nobody will really care, is about the ultimate in narcissistic behavior. Narcissism "noun. Excessive interest in, or admiration of oneself and ones physical appearance" Oxford. Branding professional know...
Anatomy of a demand chain.
This is a far longer post than normal, motivated by some very sensible feedback from the previous post. Bear with me. The "tools" that add value to management of any supply chain, playing a role in the transformation into a demand chain are relatively simple to...
Price taker to market maker
I talk to a lot of farmers, and have done so for a long time. Not much has changed over that time, it is just that there are less farmers, bigger farms, and corporatised farming, with deep capital resources is taking over from the family farming enterprise. The...
Web narcissism
Narcissism and the web just appear to go together. People seem compelled to post "selfies", even the pollies are now doing it, perhaps in an effort to appear "hip" in this crashingly boring and shallow election campaign. Most web sites just talk about themselves,...
Pitch the problem.
In any B2B sales situation of a complex product, the prospect is usually shopping for a solution to a problem, rather than shopping for a product, although most conversations I see still seem to be about a product. This idea that a potential customer is product...
As useful as Harold Holt’s flippers!
I have come to the conclusion that the crop of marketing and strategy development people looking after the current crop of Canberra wallies are about as useful as Harold Holts flippers. After watching a host of political advertising last night, even on the ABC,...