Nov 22, 2011 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Since I was a kid in this industry, the standard terminology has been to “buy media” meaning stick an ad somewhere, and hope somebody you want to reach sees it, and takes action as a result. However, the reality is that we have just rented an audience from a newspaper, TV or radio station, not bought them.
The net has changed this, as with almost everything else. Now we can buy an audience, over time by developing content that engages and draws people back again and again, encourages sharing of and comment on the comment, effectively building digital “stock in trade” that is stored for access when appropriate.
In other words, at last, we are able to create stock that we can use in the selling process, or in the case of on line retailing, a sale results directly from the stock on the net.
Nov 18, 2011 | Management, Marketing
This process has many forms, I have probably seen most of them over the years.
Percentage of sales, opposition activity, what the P&L can bear, what was spent last year, what seems like a nice round number, what the new CEO says, the last and “balancing” item in the budget, and there are others, including and significantly the confusion between strategic investments and short term tactical spending which is often just a cost of doing business in a distribution channel.
Notice the absence of customers in the mix?
All of these common budget setting tools are internal, the serve the operational needs of the business, and have nothing to do with customers, and how they are to be reached, engaged, and persuaded to become apostles for your business.
No wonder we get so much random rubbish thrown at us through the multiplicity of media channels we now have, that have nothing to do with the brand building and strategic positioning of the product or service.
Nov 16, 2011 | Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Woolworths and Coles price and promotion strategies are often shaped by what happens in the UK, as there is a history of successful imitation in Australia. The resurgence of Coles has taken the initiative from Woolworths, and the short term outcome has been price reductions to consumers, the flip side of course, and there is always a flip side, is a further hollowing of the production sector in Australia.
I am pretty sure that if you asked consumers which they would prefer, a price reduction today, or production security into the future, they would take the former, without understanding the probable consequences.
The Federal Court found last week in favor of Metcash in their effort to sell Franklins, saying in part that the competitive power of Woolworths and Coles served to keep prices to consumers down, solidifying the power of the status quo.
Nov 15, 2011 | Innovation, Leadership, Marketing
Most acknowledge that the future will be different from the past, so why is it that we seem determined to manage our way to the future by repeating the recipes of success from the past.
Future success relies on doing things differently, and this is uncomfortable, unpredictable, and unnerving, so avoided by most.
Kodak missed the development of the digital camera, despite inventing it, Nokia missed the development of the “smartphone” while a runaway market leader, all the large PC companies missed the development of the direct sales model until Dell had tied it up, Detroit missed the consumers cry for smaller, fuel efficient cars that were reliable until bankruptcy loomed, and Apple continues to clean up by reinventing categories, and everyone else just follows them into the mobile consumer markets that they pioneer.
It is the equivalent of driving along a bush track by looking through the rear vision mirror, eventually you will crash. Only by looking ahead, and navigating a path less well marked can you take a leadership position, and that requires some “Unlearning”.
Nov 9, 2011 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing
Every product manager I have ever seen sees his/her pack change, flavor extension, or new size as an innovation, and every marketing manager who lets this mediocre stuff take up valuable time, the only resource that is really irreplaceable, is culpable.
Sometimes, just sometimes, a genuine innovation emerges, and the common feature is that they almost always emerge from a culture that values their own resources, and that of their customers to the exclusion of all the usual puffery. What is left is the genuine hyping of something new, that needs at least some explanation, as it does not fit into any existing, neat categories.
Apple, Ideo, Cisco, Toyota, and a few others do it, others try and copy, change the look, but the value proposition is a copy. There is a new calculus of innovation easy enough to see if you know what to look for, really hard to do.
Nov 7, 2011 | Collaboration, Communication, Leadership
The core skill of a successful innovator is their ability to recover from disappointment and failure, to learn from it, and go again, to embrace and recover fom error, not avoid it. As Steve Jobs Pixar’s founder said, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who can” in the now more famous 1997 Apple advertisement “think different”
In this presentation by Randy Nelson, Dean of the Pixar University, the in-house learning facility of that innovation machine, Pixar, the things Pixar looks for in a potential employee are outlined. My summary and thoughts are below, but it is well worth the time watching Randy.
- Resilience and adaptability are the key components of the ability to recover, and change direction in the face of negative results and failure.
- Look for people who have mastery of something to demonstrate the innate drive to be the best. A resume is usually just a wish, a promise, so probe for mastery of something, anything as an indicator that they have what it takes to be the best.
- Find people who are interested, more than they are interesting. Interested is an indicator of curiosity, a core competence in success.
- Collaboration is more than co-operation on steroids. A production line can be co-operative, the actions at one stage impact on the actions at a subsequent one, so you need co-operation for it to work well but it is a sequential thing, whereas collaboration is all about amplification, the sum is greater than the individual parts. Individuals bring ranges of separate experience, knowledge, depth of understanding, depth of knowledge, breadth of knowledge that allows them to communicate on multiple levels, then collaboration can happen.
