To train or not to train.
One of my clients, a modest sized business inhabiting a narrowing but quite deep niche of manufacturing, has over a period of time put considerable resources into training their essenial technical people to be expert in the fields vital to their success. A topic of...
“Dad Dancing”
What a great term, coined by Euan Semple, to describe the phenomenon of older (largely) male senior executives pretending they have "got" social media. Like many others, I spend a lot of time trying to persuade people of the value that can be generated by intelligent...
Reference class forecasting
People routinely forecast optimistically, they under-forecast costs, and over-forecast outcomes. We have all seen it happen repeatedly in businesses and the public sector, most of us have seen it on personal level. Demand planning is the core of effective operational...
SME’s in FMCG in a tight spot.
SME's in the Australian food industry are up against it if they see their futures as suppliers to the major chains, who require a combination of utter commitment, globally competitive costs, and supply certainty requiring substantial scale and the attendant capital...
When marketing doesn’t matter
Rubbish you say, marketing always matters. Well, the next time you try and get some sense out of Optus or Telstra when you have anything that does not fit into an easily packaged Q&A form for someone in Bangalore who does not know Sydney from Senegal , try and...
How do I make money from Social Media?
About the most commonly asked question on the net is how to make money," how do I monetarise this great idea"?. To my mind, it is the wrong question. The right one is "How do I deepen the relationship of those who are attracted by the great idea"?. When you have made...
Playing digital catch-up
Coles & Woolies are starting out to reduce the gap between their marketing practices and those of the trendsetter, Tesco in the UK. I guess this is not surprising given they are both watching Tesco very closely, and Coles management is now dominated by ex Tesco...
The 7 ways to build collaboration
Sharing "content" is the lifeblood of social media, as well as the older disciplines of collaboration, successful negotiation, leadership, even blue collar engagement on the factory floor. With a bit of tweaking the ideas contained in this post from Social Media...
More on QR codes
A while ago I wrote a short post about QR codes, saying I thought they had the potential to change the way we think about marketing. Subsequently I came across this post and video on the Social Media Examiner site, that adds to that view, and having seen them work at...
Heinz a microcosm of Australian FMCG.
The mulitnational Heinz has been in the news a bit recently. First, they announce a restructure, which means closing plants, and consolidating production, in this case to NZ, and to a remaining Australian plant that will get a bit of a kick-along. Wonder how long that...