Digital marketing or marketing in a digital world?
It is all a matter of perspective. Digital marketing implies an application of the existing disciplines of marketing, just tweaked a bit to accommodate the presence in the environment of digital options, facebook, linkedin, Pin it, and the rest. Marketing in a digital...
Politics Vs Organisational dynamics
"Politics" is a dirty corporate word, but "Organisational Dynamics" appears to be OK, and is gaining traction as a cliché. What is the difference? Both describe the process of accumulating the wherewithal to exercise influence, and dictate outcomes. It is a fact of...
Anatomy of a failed sales pitch.
I walked into a retail store last week, the salesperson wandered up, big smile, "How can I help you" he said. Good start, better than the usual "Can I help?" which has as a possible answer, "No thanks, just looking". I told him the product category I was looking for,...
Crowdsourced funding for SME’s.
Blogs, facebook, web sites, and e-books have all bypassed the mass model of publishing, enabling huge numbers of people a creative outlet not available before 2000, but there is still the need for seed-funding. Raising the modest amounts of money to try and...
Management tax.
Not the latest desperate revenue raising measure from a proliferate government, but the cost to stakeholders of the multiple levels of management that infest most large organisations, but which add no direct value. Management manages, it manages those underneath...
Common language and common understanding.
In a recent negotiation, a good faith, and non confrontational negotiation conducted in English between one of my clients and a prospective investor from East Asia who spoke virtually fluent but non colloquial English, we suffered from a misunderstanding emerging from...
Marketing problem of the climate debate.
Marketing is all about defining the problem we want to solve, poor definition leads to poor analysis and solution implementation. In the climate "debate" to give it more credit that it deserves, we have absolutely failed to include the capital value of the natural...
Crowdsourcing electricity
On March 14, IPART, the NSW Utility regulator made public a decision that put a price of 6-8 cents for energy exported to the grid, compared to the current cost of 30-44 cents for any power consumed from the grid. The argument is in two parts, if I can put a complex...
Process, not outcomes.
It takes discipline to concentrate on the process, and to let the outcome take care of itself, recognising that there will be stumbles along the way, but in the long run, the results will come when the process is optimised. Business is filled with sporting analogies,...
Strategy leads to action
I am a strategist, with a marketing background, so sometimes the expectation is that there will be a lot of talk. Often, and too often with many of those I see, that is the case. Talk, talk, talk, and talk. However, a strategy discussion without concrete action...