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...
The 4 essential characteristics of leadership
The characteristics of leadership we expect from the local non-profit, to the largest businesses in the country, to the Prime Minister, are pretty much the same. Trust. We need to trust those who lead. However, trust is never just given, it must be earned by the...
6 conditions for Strategic creativity
'The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they'd already solved. They're open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking." Jeff Bezos...
3 parameters of successful differentiation
Having a point of differentiation that is sustainable, and sufficiently valuable to customers that they are prepared to pay for it, is marketing's holy grail. Everybody seeks differentiation, the challenge is to do it effectively. It seems to me there are three...
A picture is not worth a thousand words.
The old cliché that a picture is worth 1,000 words is disproved again and again, by all the pretty websites and dumb marketing collateral material out there, that is useless. While pictures have a valuable role in grabbing attention, the real commercial value is...
What would the goose want?
As I look at the current state of the economy from my spot as a boomer who has largely lived my life in times of peace and easy excess, it is becoming clear to me that there are two tracks at work. The first is the one along which is driving those who work for...
What multiple of LCM do you need to grow?
LCM: Lifetime Customer Margin. There is lots of talk, mostly hype, about Lifetime Customer Value. When you look closely, it almost always means lifetime customer revenue. Revenue is of little commercial value in the absence of margin, so the discussion is...