Value chain sustainability.
The word sustainable holds connotations of farming practices, and environmental sensitivity, all true, but only half the story. A sustainable chain must also be commercially sustainable, and one without the other is by definition, unsustainable. The characteristic...
Digital Darwinism.
It is simply a fact of life that digital media is evolving faster than the existing institutions around it, particularly the regulatory ones. The decision during the week to reverse the Federal Courts decision on the streaming of "almost live" NRL and AFL games by...
Advertising: cost or investment?.
The costs of advertising only get counted when you do lousy advertising. When you place an ad, and you get a great response, the costs are never considered, but place a lousy ad, getting little response, then the cost is alarming. Therefore the task is to be...
What we share and how we are seen.
Emotional intelligence, EI has a whole lot of psychological mumbo jumbo surrounding it, a search will turn up almost a million articles. So, I'll simplify all that by saying it is the capability a person has to empathise and then engage with another individual and/or...
Reputational Capital.
Trust is a greatly over-used word in management conversations, and has therefore lost much of its meaning, becoming a cliché for "lets hope". People trust brands when they deliver consistently over time, but trust is like a bucket with a hole in the bottom, you need...
Cognitive Surplus
This is a term coined by Clay Shirky to describe the ideas, skills, knowledge that resides in peoples minds, and on enterprise shelves, unused, ignored, and sometimes actively avoided. His argument is that there has been a huge shift in behavior, no longer are we...
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...