Death of an industry
Last week speaking to a gathering, I told the group that Australia was now a net importer of food with a $2.7 billion deficit in 2010-2011, according to the AFGC State of the Nation report . Utter disbelief was the primary reaction, "how could that be" being a typical...
Brand Loyalty?
The holy grail, the prime objective of billions of dollars of advertising, the wall behind which many campaigns that have failed to generate incremental sales have hidden, Brand Loyalty. I cannot help but wonder if the label "Brand Loyalty" is sometimes just a...
Four immutable laws of sales.
For years with my sales consulting hat on I have pushed the notion that when selling a product or service that requires the B2B buyer to exercise some level of consideration, so it excludes the everyday, commodity purchase, there are only three ways to get the sale:...
IP and the network business model
Another paradox surfaced by the emerging business networked models is that of ownership of IP. In the old days, just a few years ago, ownership of IP was top of mind in many if not most development situations, but then along came digital collaboration. Linux is now...
Jobs to be done.
Marketing groups usually set about segmenting markets by one of two basic ways: By demographics, age, sex, education, income, with/without children, and so on, or, By product category, for example meat is usually segmented by breed, cut, pack size, price. However,...
The Marketing HiPPO.
Years ago I worked for a Marketing Director who took his job seriously. That meant that every pack design, advertisement, poster, publicity shot, research proposal, all the day to day business of a busy marketing function had to be OK'd by him. Not only did this lead...
Branding frameworks
Selecting the best branding option is a topic that always attracts debate, in any business I have worked with. What is usually missing in these conversations is a framework for the thinking, boundaries against which to measure the options. This post from David Aaker...
Internet eco-system brain-food
For anyone interested in the evolution of the web, and the businesses that inhabit its ecosystems, particularly the big four, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple, this Fast Company article is a must read. The astonishing thing for me, is that the "big four" does not...
Creativity and risk.
Creativity at its heart is a process of either something entirely different, or coming at something currently around by an entirely different path. Weather it be a painting, piece of music, a new bit of electronic wizardry, or just a different way of combining inputs...
Pivot to innovate
Nick Hortovanyi's blog led me to this terrific short video on the "Pivot" a concept articulated by Eric Ries in his book "Lean Startup". The notion of the "Pivot" has always been there, I have seen it many times, and the willingness to fail, learn from the failure,...