Is more always better?
It seems that most innovation is aimed at getting more of the same for the same price, rather than making the experience with the product better. Every time I see an ad for a new car, it seems to have more airbags, more electronic gizmos to go wrong the day the...
The answer is inside, just ask the question.
How often is the "next big thing" hiding in your organisation without you knowing? Fairly often is seems. Probably the classic example, is the development of the first digital camera by a Kodak engineer , Steven Sasson in 1975. Kodak, with a totally dominant position...
Seeds of their own destruction.
What will be the continuing impact of the development of housebrands by retailers, and the current heightened value awareness of consumers? Most FMCG suppliers lose sleep over the retailers undermining their profitability by hogging shelf space with far cheaper...
Information Vs Mystique.
Many brands over time have been built by using "mystique" as an ingredient, generally in the form of information withheld, scarcity, price, and the stories that surround the product. In this connected world, we are bombarded with information, almost everything we...
The end of the book as we know it?
As publishing goes electronic, and the hype about the Ipad, Kindle, and other reader technologies, evolves, and drives behavior changes, publishers need to consider how they are going to market, as most consumption of books is still generated by seeing it, physically...
End of the gate-keeper.
The gate keeper role is progressively becoming redundant as web tools evolve to offer many other avenues to get "inside" a prospective customer. The most aggressive commercial gatekeepers have traditionally been in the acquisition roles, and finding ways to butter...
Customer Value Proposition
What do you do that others cannot? What enables you to deliver value for a group of customers or potential customers with something in common, which is increasingly nothing to do with demographics, that your competitors cannot match? Answer those questions, and the...
The song remains the same (with apologies to Led Zepplin)
The retail end of music industry as we currently know it continues to be in trouble. This New York Times article is now a bit old, but I am pretty sure the marketing challenge has not gone away. Imagine, 13 million songs for sale on the web in 2008, 10 million did...
The “organic” approach Vs the “planned” approach.
Much of what we read encourages us to experiment, test, and adopt and adapt the better ideas as they survive, and evolve. I am a great advocate of this approach, but the downside is that an apparent ad hoc mindset, a lack of planning discipline, may allow the basic...
Legacy strategies
We spend time and effort managing our way through legacy IT systems, recognizing the impact they have on performance, and the cost benefit of spending the capital to replace them. However, we rarely think about strategy in a similar manner. Instead we think about the...