Indecision amplified.
I spoke to a few people in Canberra yesterday, curious as to the impact of the Labor leadership cat-fight on the rest of the place. Whilst I expected it to be the topic of the day, the consensus was that work in the bureaucracy, the implementers of policy, had come to...
Sell the frog.
Successful stories are always greater than the sum of their parts. Great stories engage, enlighten, inform, and inspire, so to dissect the sum to explain the parts may seem easier than selling the whole thing, but it usually does not work. Telling the big picture,...
The why and how of budgeting
Into the new year, most companies that have June 30 as year end will start the tortuous path of setting the new budget. I have seen the budget process take 6 months, and be as useless as a water pistol in a gunfight when it comes to delivering meaningful outcomes. Two...
Product Disasters can be marketing gold.
Remember the Arnott's case, in 1997 they recalled millions of packets, and showed them being crushed on TV, in the days before u-tube. Tylenol in the US went trough the same thing in 1882, 6 packets were laced with cyanide, leading to several deaths, and J&J...
Mobile Visual Search, MVS for short
Just a few months ago, QR codes seemed to me to be the answer to a marketers prayer, a simple way for products and services to connect with anyone with a mobile device, and an interest. However, Aussies, often quick adapters of technology seemed not to be...
8 Questions for business planning.
Which customers? Which markets? What is the vale proposition? What are the processes that are required to deliver the value proposition? What capabilities are required to deliver the strategy? What technology is required to deliver the strategy? What are the...
Open Vs Closed systems scorecard.
The world is full of paradoxes. Apple, the ultimate closed system is now again, the worlds most valuable company, but was started by two blokes, one of whom was, and remains an advocate of open systems, Steve Wozniak, and the other, Steve Jobs, a passionate and...
Porters strategy do and don’t list.
Following up the post yesterday commenting on the changes the net has wrought in relation to Michael Porters ideas about substitutes. It seemed useful to add links to two useful articles by Joan Magretta, who has written a book on Porters work. The first is the...
Porter’s analysis revisited.
Michael Porter transformed strategy development 30 years ago by asking two simple questions: What are the drivers of industry profitability? What are the drivers of profitability of an individual firm in an industry? He then provided a framework to analyse both, his...
Social media code of conduct.
The risks, as well as the benefits of social media Social media are now slowly becoming recognised, particularly as the list of companies who "should know better" gets longer. Given the potential for social media to trash a brand built over decades almost overnight,...