Website chook-house
In a chook-house, there are both chickens and eggs, all mixed up, and hard to tell which chicken laid which eggs. It is a bit like the web, full of sites that could belong to any number of businesses. As a part of a project a while ago looked at the sites of a range...
The Challenge of Analytics
We have access to huge amounts of data, "Big Data" in current parlance, but wading through it all, and finding the few insights that will make a difference is a task our fathers really did not have, it is the tail side of the coin, the head being the value of the...
The “2 F’s” of life
The two "F's" of life scare us all, Failure, and caused by the fear of failure; Finishing. Because we do not want to fail, most of us avoid finishing. We procrastinate, take on "busy-work" or "easy-work" to avoid the necessity to finish the important things, and...
Manage by customer, by leveraging data
Would you rather do business with someone who knows a lot about you, and demonstrates they have your best interests at heart, or some stranger, enriching themselves? Pretty obvious answer, so why do so few retailers seem to be able to respond?. The ability to collect...
Risk portfolio management
Most enterprises are pretty familiar with project portfolio management, which always include a risk rating attached to each project. What happens if we turn the notion around, and consider the portfolio from the perspective of the risk profile of the whole portfolio,...
The Serve & Volley of selling
In tennis, the simplest point, and if you do it well the most effective, is the serve and volley. Put in a good serve, and follow up with a volley that puts the point away. Same in selling. The serve: Ask a simple question to which there is only one answer, The...
results wall
A modest sized marketing services agency I do occasional work for has an awards wall, where industry peer bestowed awards appear, a feature of most service agencies I have seen. However, theirs has two wrinkles Beneath each award is a further rating, done in...
Rocking horse syndrome
I observe lots of activity in all sorts of enterprises, public and private, see KPI's set and met, initiatives announced with fanfare (and in the case of the NSW Government re-announced)but little of any value seems to be happening. Familiar? Enter the Rocking Horse...
Innovation, Hypocrisy and Money.
Apple has beaten Samsung in the US court, protecting a raft of patents that apply to mobile devices, acquiring a pile of cash, and the probable withdrawal of a number of Samsung products from the market. Competitive nirvana. Whilst it is understandable that Apple...
4 sources of innovation
Innovation is not a marketing term, it is much wider than that, it is a mind-set. It remains however, an eternal question, often used to open another boring workshop, "What is innovation?" Usually those who ponder this question are the marketing bods, and the very...