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,...
The elasticity of status quo.
With apologies to my economist friends, the notion of demand elasticity can be applied to the status quo in an organisation. Embedding change in an organisation is remarkably hard, the status quo is capable of absorbing lots of punishment, and when the belting is...
Perception drives good decision-making.
30 years ago when housebrands were making their first inroads into Australian supermarkets, I took over management of Fountain tomato sauce. At the time it was a runaway market leader in NSW, but was being badly hurt by emerging cheap housebrands, priced a few cents...
Selling is believing.
Your high potential new customer, the one you thought you had brought into the fold, was about to sign up, the one you had assured the boss would place their first order next week, suddenly, at the 11th hour, inexplicably, they go elsewhere. Are they mad? Did they...
Politics trumps policy
When this Parliament came to us "hung", as it were, I hoped that its nature would engender a vigorous debate, the merits of policy would take centre stage as the various sides argued their point of view. Naively, I believed it would be an improvement on the staged...