Uncovering the Strategic Vs Financial value of your business.
The valuations put on businesses are typically a calculation based on future earnings, a financial calculation that has always been the basis of company valuations. We understand it well. Take current earnings and multiply them by a multiple that...
Is a continuing investment in content valuable?
In early 2014 Mark Schaefer posted a piece titled 'Content shock: Why content marketing is not a sustainable strategy' on his website. To me, it is one of the few pieces of truly intelligent strategic thinking I have seen on the topic of...
What ‘digital transformation’ is not!
It happened again over the weekend. I had a conversation with a bloke who runs a medium sized business, and is embarking on what he called a 'digital transformation'. In other words, he is paying someone to build a website. Another example of...
11 hard lessons from 40 years of building and implementing successful marketing plans
The key word in that headline is 'Implementing'. A plan is of little value unless it is implemented, the lessons from the success and failures of that implementation incorporated into the next iteration. This is not another post about the 55 things...
Is the content bandwagon terminally broken?
Back in 2014 Mark Schaefer wrote a prescient post he called 'Content Shock', in which he put the position that content marketing as it was then being practised was not a sustainable strategy. Nearly 5 years ago, this was akin to heresy. However, just like...
7 Leadership lessons from my granddaughter.
Little kids are just amazing to watch, before they have absorbed the rules of thinking and behavior that we adults impose on them. My granddaughter is just three, and yet she displays many of the leadership characteristics so admired in the libraries...
Mad Men have morphed into Math Men
Don Draper would be really pissed, his world has changed. His brand of advertising is as dated as the Model T. Instead of having hundreds of creatively driven ad agencies, all competing aggressively for your business, which involved selling you on a...
Mary Meeker 2018 KPC&B Internet trends report
The 2018 KPC&B report is now out, and gathering views on Slideshare like a runaway train. The amount and speed of the attention given to this now annual report is evidence that it has become the benchmark for analysis of the digital...
How ‘Systems Thinking’ should be applied to marketing and governance.
We think about marketing reasonably often in business, not often enough, but reasonably often. However, our thinking is usually muddled, and wrong. Let me explain. We think about marketing as if it was a discreet set of actions that can change the fortunes...
Is the supermarket business model about to be retired?
The face of the supermarket in the 2030's is emerging, and I suspect it is not a face most of us will warm to immediately. The combination of artificial intelligence and the capacity to automate just about everything will render much of the current...