Set objectives by deciding what not to do.

Set objectives by deciding what not to do.

Oct 5, 2021 | Customers, Marketing, Small business

 

We usually look at objectives and goals as the things we want to achieve. We then set about figuring out the path towards achievement.

There are always hundreds of ways to achieve a goal. Often we find ourselves bewildered by the options, and procrastinating or picking a fuzzy path as a result.

Try drawing a line through the things you will not do to achieve the goal, rather than struggling to pick what you will do.

This will help focus on a path quickly that removes ambiguity and the many opportunities to be distracted.

Over the years I have worked with a number of SME’s in the food industry. In almost every case, the seductive promise of the volumes delivering profitability to be extracted from the two supermarket gorillas is there somewhere. This always confuses the focus on delivering value and building brands for those who care about quality and differentiation before price. In addition, the resources for mass marketing and promotion that are necessary for success beyond an initial flurry in supermarket chains are usually absent in SME’s.

Failing to Recognise the mechanics of the supermarket business model, and the resultant infrastructure necessary to service this model, is a major source of financial and strategic failure of many SME’s in this space.

In those cases, I encourage people to set their goals, by excluding the option of supermarket distribution. Instead, focus their minds on the many opportunities outside supermarkets that better suit the capabilities and resources available.

 

 

 

Is your website the digital equivalent of a camel?

Is your website the digital equivalent of a camel?

Sep 29, 2021 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media

 

As we all know, a camel is a horse designed by a committee.

So it is with many websites.

Digital camels.

Every page on a website should have only two objectives:

  1. Provide the catalyst to ‘convert’ to the next step.
  2. Make the conversion easy.

Not every page is a sales convertor, but each page should play a role in the progressive process towards a transaction, whether it be the first, or the twenty first, only the number matters.

The most common response I get when I make these sorts of observations are: ‘we need to educate‘ and ‘the objective of the site is brand building‘.

Both are valid drivers of the content of a website, but unless they ultimately lead to sales, they are little more than platitudes and good intentions.

Is your website just an elegantly coiffured  camel?

 

 

 

The three inevitable stages of successful entrepreneurial activity

The three inevitable stages of successful entrepreneurial activity

Sep 27, 2021 | Customers, Innovation, Small business

Every business starts small. The biggest on the planet all started somewhere, in a garage, dorm room, lab, somewhere between the ears of the entrepreneur.

Most fail, or at best deliver a return that would have been dwarfed by the interest on the same investment in a bank account.

Some however, do succeed, occasionally in spectacular fashion.

We all see the ones that do, they are shoved down our throats all the time as the heroes, the ones who made it, and we are asked the question, if they can, why can’t you?

There seems to me to be a pretty consistent sequence of growth, a sequence that holds true across all sorts of products and services, geographies, technologies, and circumstances.

Cheering.

This is the first stage, it is all enthusiasm, cheering from the sidelines, jumping up and down, wishing for stuff to happen. What it is about when you are in the midst of it all is hard grind, chaos, and cash.

At the beginning, you work your arse off, seemingly 24/7, with no letup. Everything that gets done depends on you doing it, you do not do it, it does not get done. Simple. It is messy, usually chaotic, as pressures come from every direction, your attention is demanded by each, which is why the 24/7, and still there is little forward progress.

Then there is cash. As you start, nothing is more important than cash. More start-ups go broke for lack of cash than every other reason combined. Managing your cash is simply the most important thing you must do.

Planning & doing.

Assuming you survive the cheering stage, you will have come to the point where you have a little more head time to be used considering ‘what next’. You probably have a small number of employees, and perhaps some outsourced services, like accounting and IT.

Answering the ‘what next’ question will be eating at your guts, as for sure you do not want to continue as you have been. Your kids are growing up without you, your family seem to be strangers, you have not had a weekend with your mates for ages.

So, you look forward to a different future and stumble into some planning. It is never as easy as filling in some generic template, of which there are plenty making alluring promises. It is more about the graft of figuring out how to accumulate and allocate the resources necessary to grow. While the game is still about cash, it has also become about profit, what is left for reinvestment at the end of the month, quarter, and year.

You plan your products and services, the foundation stuff you need to get right, like the legal and regulatory things that must be done, understand the financial and strategic pressures that are present, and settle for the moment on a business model that guides how you will turn your chaos into sustainable profitability.

However, a plan, no matter how good it may be at telling the future, envisioning new products, markets, and customers, needs one further ingredient.

It needs to be implemented.

Plans that do not get implemented are usually called dreams. You will also recognise the realty of the muttering of generals throughput the ages that while planning is essential, nothing ever goes exactly to plan, so you must be ready to be agile tactically, while consistent strategically.

Building & growing.

The essential ingredients to building and growing an enterprise, on top of the financial resources that enable that growth are threefold:

  • People to do the work,
  • Processes for people to follow, and over time, optimise,
  • Retention of the hunger and freedom that enables innovation.

The great paradox, and downfall of many if not most successful businesses is that they get the last one wrong, as they optimise risk out of their processes in favour of certainty and continuity of the status quo.

The task of being the entrepreneur has changed from one of management, to one of leadership. You are no longer engaged in tactical activity, which is being done by others in a manner that is transparent to overview, and with KPI’s based on outcomes. The tasks now are about the people doing the work, from the daily tactical stuff to the functional management. Your role is to lead all these people and ensure that the processes being deployed deliver on the plan. It is all about the productivity of resources deployed, people and financial, that is delivered via the processes that evolve.

Anyone who thinks this is easy has never done it.

Anyone who stands on the sidelines and cheers for you might be a cheerleader, supporter, and beneficiary, but they are not a coach. A coach delivers the models and means by which the success is generated, which is much more than cheering, as it involves getting dirty from time to time, being always challenging, and ensuring you are looking beyond the tactical that threatens to always consume you.

At each point in this growth pattern, there is a single question that you can ask that will give you an answer to the question of growth potential contained in any tactical decision:

‘Does this scale?’

Many small business owners do not ask this question, so end up selling their time for money, and there is only a limited time in any day. Therefore, if you are about to invest in tactical activity of any type, ask that simple question. If the answer is yes, fine. If it is no, think again.

When you are looking for a coach with the scars to prove experience, browse through the posts on this StrategyAudit site, and then you might want to give me a call.

Is pain always the best catalyst for rapid change?

Is pain always the best catalyst for rapid change?

Sep 22, 2021 | Innovation, Strategy

In the absence of pain, it is easier to do nothing, and just let things evolve.

This is human, we do not invest ‘just in case’, we invest to reduce pain, or more carefully, to leverage an opportunity. This is why big companies & bureaucracies are slow at reacting, the individuals who can lead change, those at the top feel little pain, in fact, accepting risk is dangerous, and invites pain into the room, so risk is avoided.

Look at any major event in history, the pain associated with it leads to change. Any war, epidemic, coup, they all lead to change. Often the change may have happened over a long time frame in the absence of the pain, but in its presence, the time is suddenly compressed.

Just look at the speed that mRNA vaccines have rolled out of labs and into peoples arms over the last 18 months.

The science of mRNA has been evolving slowly for decades. The first suggestion that RNA molecules that drive the synthesis of proteins, move around in a cell was made in the early fifties, and messenger RNA (mRNA) was discovered in 1961.

The first successful trials with mice of an mRNA vaccine were done in the early 90’s. However, the idea was not the target of significant investment, as it seemed alternative approaches were more promising. Over the last decade as the development of CRISPR technology made mRNA techniques potentially more stable, there was renewed scientific interest.

By early 2018 there was a body of scientific exploration that indicated that there was a significant opportunity for mRNA vaccines to be successfully deployed against a range of viruses.

Then along came Covid.

The rate of development accelerated dramatically because of the rapid and huge investment of both public and private money. By mid-2020 both Pfizer established in 1849, and Moderna established in 2010, were conducting human trials of a synthetic version of the messenger molecule that moves RNA from the nucleus of a cell to the outer casing of that cell, delivering protection from the virus.

Since then, there has been the biggest human trial in history going on, with millions of participants from whom data is being collected, enabling the rapid refinement of these vaccines.

This is exactly the process that has happened many times over history. A crisis of some sort compresses geometrically the time that would normally be associated with a significant change. However, the seeming rapid deployment of pain relievers usually happens after a long gestation of the basic science that delivers the antidote. mRNA did not happen overnight, the development from an idea to a testable molecule took decades before the vaccine could be developed and commercialised.

Pain causes rapid change as we seek aggressively to relieve it, disregarding the usual barriers, and accelerating the deployment of the science in products that relive the pain that are improved in real time.

As an aside, I would have thought the fires and floods of early 2020 in eastern Australia would have been sufficient pain for the message of climate change to penetrate the  collective brains of our political ‘leaders’, but it seems not. The final catalyst to action on this front will have to be really nasty indeed!

Header sketch. Francis Crik. The header is an informal 1956 sketch of the role Francis Crick imagined was played by RNA in the transfer of information in a cell. The presence of what became known as ‘messenger RNA’ was confirmed several years later.

Note: my understanding of the development process of mRNA is rudimentary at best, I am a marketer not a scientist or biologist.

Post Script September 2025. One of my scientificlly minded friends, Phil Jackson sent me this youtube video this morning. It goes into much more detail about how mRNA works, and the leadup science that went ito the development. For those few who read this, it will be of interest.

Winning the branding war of the decade.

Winning the branding war of the decade.

Sep 8, 2021 | Change, Marketing, Strategy

There is a massive but unrecognised marketing and branding war going on right on front of our eyes, unseen by most, but substantially funded by taxpayers.

It is the Covid vaccine marketing war.

Which brand will you choose?

The development of these vaccines has happened at unprecedented speed, driven by the commercial opportunities delivered to the pharmaceutical industry’s doorstep by Covid.

There are a number of agreements entered into  by the Federal Government for the supply of vaccines, as well as the evolving commitment to creating manufacturing capability for mRNA vaccines. This would be additional to the rDNA capability we already have as a result of the brilliant strategic and financial  management of  CSL over an extended period.

Astra Zeneca? Pfizer? Both of which are TGA approved, and in distribution. Moderna is now TGA approved, on order, and about to arrive on our shores.

Which do you choose?

By moving the availability goalposts around by press release, and completely muddying the waters around the facts in the attempt to cover the total lack of planning in 2020, the federal government has created a minefield of questions and mistrust. Into this uncertainty have stepped the pharmaceutical marketers, often ignored genuine expert scientists, the ‘Looney-fringe’ with a barrow to push (a space inhabited also by some politicians with a vague grasp on the truth) purveyors of snake-oil, ‘no vaccers’, and a horde of self-appointed experts sprouting nonsense that just further confuses.

Who really knows the facts amongst the triumphant press releases and soothing words acting as prophylactics against the truth of the failure of (most) politicians to listen to, understand and communicate scientific advice.

‘Modelling’ varying covid outcomes has become a game of who can give me the answer I want. The Doherty institute modelling is widely and selectively quoted, misquoted, and ignored, as is the modelling from the Kirby Institute, and various other scientific and research organisations.

On top of the existing AZ, Pfizer and about to arrive Moderna vaccines, you have a range of other brand contenders. A Johnson & Johnson rDNA vaccine is being widely used in the US, amongst a number of not yet approved in this country options, like the creatively named ‘Sputnik’ and the Chinese ‘Sinovac’ version.

Then you have the schism between the rDNA and mRNA vaccines. This is science way beyond my understanding, but to a layman it seems that the ‘old’ vaccines, typified by Astra Zeneca are rDNA, and the newer technology, Moderna and Pfizer are mRNA

Which will you choose?

What an expensive and truly monumental mess for us, and a profit pool of unprecedented depth for those Pharma companies smart enough to put themselves in a position to dip the snout.

If I was a betting man, I would be betting on Pfizer as the winning brand. They have used one of the oldest and most effective selling techniques with great skill: scarcity. It has ramped up unfulfilled demand and this has increased perceived value enormously. In addition, they are the leaders in the newest technology, and in this space, the first mover advantage is huge.

For those who may be interested, following is some of what I have learned sifting through the mounds of material relating to the brands of vaccination medications. Apologies in advance for the simplicity, and for any errors of fact.

mRNA vs rDNA. A layman’s explanation.

DNA is the double helix design we are all familiar with, that carry the genetic instructions for the development, growth, and reproduction of life. It is the long-term storage device that drives the development and evolution of a species.

RNA is in effect the messenger that converts the instructions contained in the DNA into the proteins that take action to produce the individual cells that make up the individual organism within a species.

To date, vaccines have all been based on delivering a mechanism that results in variations that give protection from specific conditions when the cells reproduce, by altering the instructions carried when the strands of DNA split to create new cells. These variations offer protection from the condition for which the vaccine was developed. It is a game of trial and error in the lab. This is typified by the existing influenza vaccines that have been around for years. Each year, the pharmaceutical companies predict the ‘next wave’ of mutation of existing strains of the flu and produce vaccines in anticipation of next winters flu. The technology is well understood, and the processes repeatable. Many members of ‘big Pharma’ produce their versions of DNA vaccines, including CSL in Australia.

RNA has offered the holy grail of being able to translate the instructions from DNA into instructions for the cells of an individual to produce proteins that protect from the targeted infection.

The Corona pandemic put a rocket under the scientific work being done on RNA for several decades, compressing the scientific development time from decades into a year. They are based on new genetic technology called ‘synthetic messenger RNA’, a manufactured version of the substance that directs protein production in our body cells. The idea has been around for several decades, based on the recognition of the role RNA (Ribonucleic Acid) plays in the transmission of genetic codes necessary for our body to produce proteins. Understanding the mechanics of RNA is like opening a recipe book for bespoke medications for individuals to address a wide range of conditions, but the technical hurdles have been significant to date.

The result is ‘new boy on the block’ mRNA vaccines represented so far by Pfizer and Moderna.

Pfizer is 150 years old, founded by an immigrant German chemist in New York in 1849. It produced and sold medications for then common ailments such as intestinal worms, until a ‘bet the company’ investment in using fermentation technology to mass produce penicillin in 1942. Since that time Pfizer has taken over a number of significant competitors and adjacent companies, becoming a huge pharma conglomerate, producing ‘hit’ wonder drugs such as Xanax and significantly by accident, Viagra. The investment in mRNA has continued for some time, as a response to the waning sales of their other drugs as the lapsing of patents enabled competition.

Moderna by contrast is a new company formed in 2010 to commercialise the science emerging from labs around compounds that supress the immune reaction to the injection of synthetic RNA into an individual’s body. For them, the emergence of Covid was a ‘gift’ that offered an injection of capital and marketability of ballistic proportions.

 

Where to from here?

mRNA offers the potential, indeed, probability of developing more potent and targeted vaccines almost in real time, and there is a huge research effort quietly being applied, by both incumbent pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, J&J, and now Moderna, as well as newcomers. For example, Alphafold is an AI breakthrough of a Google subsidiary ‘Deep Mind’ that can predict the structure of proteins, an essential piece in the mRNA jigsaw . It is a combination of Neuro and Computer science. Again, this is way beyond my understanding, but those ‘in the know’ seem to be jubilant. It seems it is an advance, using similar processes to the AlphaGo program that stunned everyone by beating the best Go player in the world. Go is a game of Chinese origin many times more complex than chess, and it had been assumed that algorithms could not replicate the billions of options open in the game. AlphaGo learns as it goes, just as humans do, and that learning can be applied to the development of the immuno-proteins that make up mRNA vaccines.

Then, we have the promise of geometrically increasing data analytical capacity with the development of quantum computing.

A couple of further places I would like to go.

  • We stop talking about ‘70%’ vaccination rates as the point at which we might open up. Let’s be honest, and acknowledge that it is 70% of the ‘eligible’ population, which excludes those under 18, coincidentally the voting age. The reality is that it is more like 50%, and no epidemiologist I have heard speak believes that number is even in the ballpark of a reasonable place to consider opening safely.
  • Let’s have an intelligent conversation about what happens when ‘son of Delta’ arrives, as it inevitably will, and let’s not be caught again without pants around our ankles, bending over trying to tie our shoelaces so we can run from it.
  • Let’s also acknowledge that 50% vaccination rate, while grossly inadequate, is way better than much of the world’s population, whose governments do not have the funds to buy the jabs, or their ‘leaders’ have their resources tied in hidden accounts in Switzerland. I wonder where Son of Delta might emerge? Yes, probably amongst those unvaccinated populations in the third world.

Hopefully, if you have read this far, it is a bit clearer. It is to me. What started out as a simple post on the observation of an essentially publicly funded branding war became a monster, as I tried to answer for myself the ever present marketing question: what has to be true to give us this outcome?

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