Investing for the future Vs paying for the past.
It is encouraging to see some intelligent debate emerging on the state of Australia's productivity. The business forum in Canberra on April 12, the comment on the speech and scary graphs Don Argus presented a few weeks ago, and just in the pub, despite the objections...
Foundations of strategy
Observing and working with a wide range of clients and networks over a long period, it seems to me that there are three foundations of strategy that appear time and time again, present in the successes, and absent in the failures. Differentiation. Clear, sustainable...
Retailer advertising
Woolworths has "gone for the box", advertising their "Select" range of housebrand products. The ads broke last weekend, (they have been removed from Youtube, curious) and to me appear to pretty effective, because they convey a single, simple proposition, that of top...
Social branding brilliance.
Content is the new creativity. In the "old days" a core part of developing advertising that had brand building as its purpose, was a need to be memorable, relevant, deliver a proposition, and cut through the clutter on TV (or magazines, or radio, our only choices) all...
Paradox of planning & doing.
We all do stuff in business every day, and largely assume that it needs to be done because it is in the budget. In other words, we are making investment decisions at a micro level simply because there is an institutional requirement to consume the resource. Rather...
Tyranny of the urgent.
I kept a diary of how I spent my time recently, and noted a number of things I suspected, but did not have the "data" such as it was. Being "connected" had reduced my productivity significantly. My concentration was broken when emails came in, seemingly demanding just...
Social Media is just the tool.
Like Theodore Levitt's old adage of marketing that people don't buy a drill, they buy a hole, so it is with Social Media. Social media is the tool, it can be used badly, effectively, creatively, and efficiently, like any tool, but it is the impact of the tool, the...
To SM or not to SM
I find myself continually attempting to argue the case for investment in Social Media at the expense of more traditional broadcast and print media. Almost everyone I interact with from my large clients to the local tennis club fail to instinctively understand the full...
A sense of shared purpose.
A small manufacturing business I work with, operating in a domain now dominated by a few huge retailers, and cheap imported products, is facing a dilemma. Three key people are leaving at pretty much the same time, for different reasons, just with difficult...
Encouraging evolution protects against revolution.
Evolution happens in most circumstances in the absence of strong 'anti-evolution" measures, and often even then, generally there is stuff happening at the fringes. However, rigid barriers hold back change, until like the boy in the dyke, you run out of fingers, and...