Chief cook & bottle washer.
How often have we heard this expression describing the role a small business owner fills? However, it trivialises the difficulty in remaining on top of the strategy issues and implementation, as well as the tactical demands of a business, putting out the inevitable...
Know your customers processes.
Spin Selling, written by Neil Rackham probably 30 years ago is the best sales book I have ever read, it has spawned an industry, along with the follow up books. However, it is not perfect. In my experience, most businesses of sufficient size to have a purchasing...
An orchestra as a metaphor for a chain.
Coordination and Control are the key words in managing demand chains, and an orchestra is a great metaphor for a demand chain. To work effectively a chain needs control in the sense of a conductor in an orchestra, who dictates the interpretation of a piece of music,...
Market researchers make 2 basic mistakes, continuously.
They ask consumers/customers their views on things with which they have no experience, typically new products. This gives results that are rarely accurate, as there is no context against which potential consumers/customers can judge the relative performance of the...
Another day, another dollar
I should comment about the Federal budget handed down on Tuesday night, it is expected, so here goes, on behalf of the small businesses I work with. The bank is still chasing to reduce the overdraft. Sales are still hard to get, and getting harder, and margins are...
Category management
Category Management is an FMCG term being bandied around so much that is coming to mean nothing in particular, because it is so widely used. In its genesis, it was an expression used to describe the manner in which retailers managed their limited shelf space and range...
Target market cartoon
Tom Fishburne nails it with this cartoon satirising the target market conversations that occur with monotinous regularity in many marketing/advertising offices. Many just do not get it, that to be "remarkable" to use Seth Godins term, is crucial to attracting an...
Must have Vs Nice to have
Feature creep, along with its big brother, range extension, have been mainstays of marketing activity for 50 years. Marketers should now start thinking about, and asking consumers about the relative value of new features or variants. Ask them what they must have, and...
Stages in chain development
Over many years of being involved in the evolution of demand chains, there appears to be a number of stages through which they evolve. It is almost always iterative, often with many false starts and dead ends, but those that persist, display the following stages:...
Can “e- newspapers” survive without the paper version
In a recent blog I mused about the business model of the newspaper industry, wondering if it could survive , given the inroads of the web. It is also reasonable to ask if the e-paper can survive without the paper version. How hard wired is the behavior that leads to...