An extreme case of Marketing Alchemy: Bananas!
Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan may have set a new world record. He taped a banana to a wall in an art exhibition in Florida on December 7, 2019, which was then sold for $120,000 (US) dollars. The buyers, Billy and Beatrice Cox acknowledged the absurdity, but...
5 essential factors to build a B2B sales pipeline that delivers consistent revenue.
Selling B2B is a complex activity. Success takes time, effort, and persistence. Therefore, to be truly productive, it requires the discipline of a repeatable process that is also measurable and scalable. In order to achieve this outcome, there are 5 factors...
Marketing technology. Master or servant?
This is a story of two modest sized SME clients. One has spent a lot of time, effort and money building a marketing technology 'stack', to use the vernacular. The expectation was that it would deliver significant marketing productivity, which they...
How to think about your business
Business is simple, in principal. Sell something for more than it cost you to produce or acquire it, recognising that the buyer needs to understand that the value they will derive from the product is greater than the cost they incur in buying it. Simple....
How do you trouble shoot flow?
You never get this process of articulating flow right first time, or second, maybe third for simple tasks. People are always people, they are in a hurry, forgetful, negligent, or new to the task, so it has to be made as easy as possible. Toyota pioneered this idea of...
The core problem of calculating a return on an investment in marketing.
Return on Investment is a very simple financial equation. What you earned, minus what you spent, divided by what you spent. Earn $100 after spending $75, divided by the $75, and you have a 33% ROI. Put another way, for every dollar you spend, you get back $1.33....
The grassroots essentials of marketing
What do we mean by the term ‘marketing’? I suspect if I did a poll, there would be a scarily wide range of responses. So, let me repeat the definition I have evolved over 45 years, which would not be found in any textbook. ‘Marketing is the identification,...
Why most enterprises fail at cost effective marketing
It is budget time again, that time of the year when planning comes to the fore, usually as an added job that is just a pain in the rear. There is an easy way, and a hard way. The easy way is to download a template and get the intern to spend a day filling in the gaps....
How to make better decisions, more often.
A decision is a choice, made in the face of a problem. Problems, at their core, have only two sources: Uncontrollable events. Flawed processes and their application. These two sources have entirely different paths to a solution. Flawed processes need to...
How do you reconcile conflicting statements by geniuses?
'If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.' Peter Drucker. 'Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.' Albert Einstein. How can both be true? The first is half true, the second is absolutely true, which...