Apostles and detractors
The aim of brand builders is to engage with consumers to the point where they become apostles for the brand, an much effort has gone into developing measures that use this notion as a measure of brand strength. On the other side of the coin are the detractors of...
Intellectual capital and return on assets.
Return on Asset calculations as a realistic basis of performance measurement for many firms is rapidly going out the window. On one hand we do the financial calculations, based on the accounting notion of tangible assets in the business, whilst on the other, saying...
Water and the carbon trading debate.
Over the last 10 years in the farming operations that make up a substantial portion of my client base, the foundations of the decisions being made have been radically altered by the rapidly increasing cost of water. Water productivity is a now common term, coined to...
Putting the “I” back in Alliances
The following list was imbedded in an article "putting the I back in Alliances" by Rosabeth Moss Canter, one of the better management thinkers around. It creates a simple list of things any successful alliance requires. Individual excellence: Both sides bring...
Too few marketers.
Brands take years, often decades of work, investment, and insight to develop, but they can be destroyed in the blink of an eye. In channels where there is an imbalance of power between links in the supply chain, such as FMCG retail, the retailers short term best...
Knowledge flow in demand chains
Technology has multiplied the potential for information flows through a value chain, but often human behavior hampers it as individuals use the available information to enhance their own position. This happens internally, but is even more prevalent in the interactions...
Marketing personnel productivity enhancement.
As a senior marketing executive in a previous life, in a business with a highly seasonal FMCG product range, I used to force the marketing department to spend substantial amounts of time in the field with our field sales force in the critical pre Christmas period. The...
The trouble with a “BHAG”
There is a growing trend, perhaps driven by the difficult times for management to set very big goals, the "Big Hairy Audacious Goals" proposed by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their book "Built to last", and hope to create the focus necessary to achieve the BHAG...
Intuition & Instinct
That ability to make quick decisions that more often than not, turn out to the right choice is an envied and rare talent. How much is just pure talent, and how much is training, instinct, and experience? After 35 years of engagement with management, it appears to me...
Sales lead generation and qualification.
Every business has in some form a process for generating, qualifying, and allocating resources to sales leads. In many businesses, it is a very expensive, resource hungry exercise, so finding a way to short circuit the process, would be offer the potential for a major...