The 6 most common mistakes with marketing metrics, and how to fix them.
Many if not most marketers, approach metrics that seek to increase their accountability with about the same enthusiasm they would approach a snake of unknown species in their backyard. Warily. The default has become a range of numbers that might look useful,...
Is ‘Sales’ really just a numbers game?
Contrary to much advice, sales is not just a pure numbers game, the quality of the numbers make more difference than the numbers themselves. Throw the net widely to attract prospects, the more the better, is the common mantra. It implies anyone who shows the...
The leadership quality no ‘Top 10’ list includes.
There is a huge hole in every 'top 10 characteristics of a great leader' list I have seen. They all list approximately the same things, by different names, and in different order. Honesty, integrity, transparency, vulnerability, vision, creativity,...
Where do your ‘edge’ opportunities hide?
Edges are often fuzzy, but are where the action happens, in nature and in business. At the edge, there is less homogeneity, more opportunity for the different and interesting to be seen, trialled, and if successful take hold. By contrast, in the 'middle' there is...
The essential task that delivers process improvement
Nothing these days is done in one place, by one person, beginning to end. There is always a process in place, a chain of events that has to all work together in a co-ordinated manner to optimise the outcome. We all know that old cliché, a chain is only as...
A marketer’s explanation of Standard Error.
The 'Standard Error' is another of those confusing statistical terms marketers need to understand. It is often confused with, and is as misunderstood as 'Standard Deviation'. While they are related, and the Standard Deviation calculation is used in the calculation of...
A marketer’s explanation of Standard Deviation.
Marketers often hear the term 'Standard Deviation' during research debriefs, and conversations with operational personnel managing quality. Many do not know what the term means, and in what context to use it. Standard Deviation is a statistical term that...
The 2,000th StrategyAudit blog post
2,000 posts published. A milestone, achievement, a joy. I tried to do a count of the notes, links, ideas, half written posts, and completed but inadequate posts in my One-note files and gave up. It is in the 10's of thousands, over 12 years (March 2009 was the...
Financial fraud: is this the biggest hidden cost to your business?
Small and medium businesses have many advantages over their larger rivals. They also have many disadvantages, which centre around the more limited resources they have to get the job done. One of those disadvantages rarely spoken about, but sadly, present too often, is...
Has the evolution of marketing been sufficient for sustained success?
If you asked a room full of marketers if marketing had changed in the last decade, you would get most of them telling you it had changed radically. On the surface it has, the digital revolution has taken marketing by the neck and given it a great big shake....