Innovation top 50 performers
Fast Company's innovation list is out again, the top 50 for the year. It includes the usual suspects, Google, Facebook, Linked-in, and so on, but also 2 retailers, Californian Trader Joes at 11, and Britain's Marks & Spencer at 36. Both are surprising, although...
Social “Apponomics”
Apps are a part of our lives, a very recent innovation, and they are not going away any time soon. The commercial challenge is how to monetarise them, make a return, build a business. We have learnt since the tech bubble a decade ago that if you build it, no matter...
Marketing, blogging, and some introspection.
Writing this blog for a couple of years, to a small (but increasing) audience, has made me think about Kevin Costner. Sad. I started to write the blog, and for a long time no-one came, just as KC built the field, and no-one came. I continued to write it as a personal...
Presentations that work.
Marketing is mostly about storytelling, engaging people in the emotion of the value proposition, and every presentation you do is a selling opportunity, for an idea, a vision, and sometimes a product. Presenting to an audience of strangers is for many people, an...
Brands work two ways
Most marketers will tell you what their brand stand for, premium quality, reliable performance, consistent taste, great service, and so on. Sounds a bit like a bunch of cliches doesn't it? However, it is just as valid to define your brand by what it is against, and...
Scenario planning deserves a rethink.
Scenario planning was a popular tool 20 years ago, but seems to have been supplanted by other tools, and priorities, or forgotten. In an increasingly unpredictable world, it makes sense to step back, and consider a range of perhaps unlikely scenarios, after all, those...
Proximity and personal marketing tools: the coming wave
It seems only a short time ago I stumbled across the reality that mobile devices and their GPS capabilities could be used as tools to entice customers in various ways, almost like spruikers outside "that" sort of establishment . Suddenly they are everywhere, and blogs...
Risk management feeds innovation
This appears to be a counter intuitive statement, but when you think about it, the outcome, innovation is all about directing resources to where they will deliver the best outcome, seeing the opportunity, managing towards a common goal, enhancing the customer...
The value of forced isolation
This note is being written on a plane, somewhere over Asia in the middle of a long flight to the UK to see a few who can contribute to my store of knowledge, and hopefully I to theirs. It is a time of few distractions, the phone is off, nobody at the door, no meetings...
Managing virtual teams.
Management structures have flattened and globalised at the same time, radically changing the way collaboration happens. Now virtual teams work across all sorts of boundaries, and have created a new set of challenges. Traditional management simply does not work...