Should housebrands be illegal?
Retailer 'brands' have taken a huge toll on the ability of proprietary marketers to profitably market their brands and build markets in FMCG. A proprietary marketer may spend several years and make a huge investment in product R&D, market research,...
The ‘why’ and ‘how’ of a successful daily huddle
Chasing improvements in an enterprise comes down to doing the small things well, every time, and continuously improving, generating a compounding effect. The best way to achieve this is for everyone involved to be engaged in the process, have a stake in...
Ultimate Test: How much do consumers value their privacy?
A few weeks ago, Apple released an upgrade of their operating system, iOS 15. This release includes a (potentially) monumental change in the digital world of communication. Its default is to turn off the ability of a third party to track your online activity....
The recipe for culture change
Culture change is perhaps the hardest challenge to be faced by any leader. It can evolve over time, with patience and commitment, but every successful change I have seen comes after a catalytic event of some sort. Many years ago, I worked for a manufacturing...
Simple and true are not the same
Part of the job of marketing is to make the complex simple and understandable, while retaining the essential core of the proposition. As Einstein said, 'Everything should be made as simple as possible, no simpler'. This is the same logic used by 'Occam’s Razor’, which...
What drives brand strength in B2B?
Brand is underplayed as a source of economic power in B2B. We seem to default to the tactical marketing tools used in B2C too easily. Over the years I have concluded that there are only two core elements in B2B brand strength: Trust. Service. They are mutually...
9 common factors in successful SME’s I have seen
Successful businesses in my experience have several things in common, and in general do most of them well. Focus. They are sufficiently disciplined to be able to assemble and deploy resources against a limited number of objectives and opportunities. This...
Social media marketing brain dump.
'Social Media Marketing' has become a substitute in many people's minds for 'Marketing'. It is sensible to have such a strategy, just as it is sensible to have an email marketing strategy, and a telephone marketing strategy, in the appropriate circumstances....
A marketer’s explanation of cash flow.
I was astonished when I recently went back to all the stuff I had written to copy and paste a simple explanation of cash flow into something I was doing. I had written a post some years ago, but not in the detail required in this instance. Astonishing because I...
How do you manage multiple parallel cycles?
The product lifecycle is a well understood concept. Introduction, growth, maturity, decline, illustrated usually with a nice even normal curve, which almost never reflects what happens in the real world. Despite its distance from the real world, it remains a central...