Three critical success factors of a newsletter.
A colleague has a newsletter, he emails it to his list on an irregular basis as he has something he thinks of interest to say. When I unsubscribed, he rang me, angry that I had done so, after all I am known personally, and have an interest in the topic....
How will the banks ever recover our trust?
Over the last decade, banks, and other financial institutions have spent billions, I have no idea how many, but guess multiples, on telling us they are our friends, there for us, reliable, trustworthy, yada, yada, yada. That investment has gone. Poof....
6 essential questions from the devil
Having a 'devils advocate' around you is one of the most productive relationships you can have in a complicated enterprise. Such a relationship enables the stripping of any position held back to its core, removing the bias, preconceptions, and power of the...
8 ingredients for an idea stew
Ideas do not emerge from nothing, despite the hype, they do not just appear in the shower. They are always a product of a process, conscious or unconscious that connects and curates thoughts, knowledge, ideas from other domains, that can be used in a...
A marketers explanation of the difference between an ‘Intangible Asset’ and ‘Goodwill’
When you look at a balance sheet, the intangible elements of it are either the outcome of ‘boilerplate’ accounting standards that bear little resemblance to reality, or are the function of a management narrative. Neither is of much use, and both can be...
What does the FMCG future look like?
It is easy to be critical of just about anything, much harder to be constructive, and make suggestions about how to change the things that attracted the criticism. In my case, I have been critical of the retail gorillas, Coles and Woolworths for some...
Is Anzac day still relevant?
Today is Anzac Day, 2018. 102 years after the photo above was taken, and my daughters 33rd birthday. All are significant. It seems to me that Anzac Day is a day when Australians can, for one day a year, have a common view about something, about where we...
Is marketing’s greatest failure in the boardroom?
There have been libraries written about strategy, and particularly marketing strategy. There are now multitudes of tools and templates available to develop and implement, but the gap between the development and successful implementation of marketing...
Have we reached a moral watershed with private data?
Privacy has been a question on the table for some time, pretty much since the dawn of the digital age. However, there has always been a deep paradox between what was generally said, indeed legislated for, and what we did. The aspect rarely considered is...
The two crucial leading indicators of business performance.
‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication’. So said Steve Jobs and he was not only right, but just one of a long line of people saying similar things. Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Mark Twain, and my personal favourite, a marketing guru of great stature,...