Shopping is social.
Amidst the moans being heard from bricks and mortar retailers, you can still see in almost any store you choose to enter, opportunities to make the experience of shopping easier. If it was more social, friendly, service oriented in stores, it follows that shoppers...
Fight the war once
Huge amounts of marketing dollars are spent to convince customers to come back. They try the product, leave, or just shop around, so we spend to get them back. If marketing really was a war, as the analogies often go, it would be the same as expending resources to...
Engage to persuade.
A vast array of marketing & sales activity is aimed at persuading, far less are aimed at engaging. This may appear to be a largely semantic difference, but consider the difference when you see someone undertaking an activity they are paid to do, compared to...
Cost Vs Value of advertising
Her we go again, another paradigm shift (cliché warning) in media. The basis of the advertising business has always been cost per impression. Doesn’t matter about the medium, that is how the costs have been calculated, however, there is a pretty clear recognition that...
Brand-stretching
How far can you stretch a brand without diluting the power of the core? The answer it seems is "it depends". The stronger and more defined the brand, the more it stands for something specific, the less adaptable it is, and the converse is also true, the less defined...
Here comes the future of design
3-D printing has been around for a while, extraordinary technology evolving rapidly offering many "Oohh, Arrhh" moments, as we saw various items like wrenches, and skeletal joints being "printed" as working models. The technology is now going further, watch here for a...
“You get what you measure”.
It has always been so. The father of the modern manufacturing revolution, W. Edwards Deeming probably said it first in a management setting, that led to lean, the TPS, 6 sigma, and a host of management articles, cliches, and learned papers, but it has been said...
Innovative and creative
Contrary to much common usage, these two concepts are not synonyms, they are very different. Creativity is the process of dreaming up something new, while Innovation is the process of making use of the new stuff. How often has Van Gogh, or Beethoven been accused of...
Scope of Innovation
Fast Company's 50 most innovative companies of 2012, a pretty impressive list, but most are tech companies in one way or another, which I guess reflects the domain of Fast Company magazine. However, I think the omission by implication of a broarder definition of...
Australia Inc. A strategy please!
If Australia was a company, it would be a case study for the need for a coherent strategy as the basis for commercial sustainability. As it is, the place is a shambles, the Directors are held in contempt, clearly they are not listening to management, and have no ideas...