Oct 8, 2024 | Analytics, Innovation, Strategy
Have you ever been in a situation where you just ‘know’ a course of action is right?
No data, no detailed scenario planning, you just know.
I have.
Where does that confidence come from, and is it justified?
Have you distinguished between genuine intuition, based on experience and knowledge, and the overconfidence that can arise from a lack of awareness of one’s limitations?”
In my experience which includes choices that have been both very good, and very poor, there are two qualitative drivers of those good choices.
Significant domain experience.
This experience does not come from being around for a while, it comes from taking action many times, and learning from the outcomes, resetting, and trying again.
For example: a seasoned chess grandmaster can often intuitively anticipate the best move without consciously calculating every possible outcome, drawing on years of experience and pattern recognition.”
Learning from analogy.
When you see a course of action succeed in other domains that have some similarity to your own, you can infer that the success may be repeatable in yours.
For example: The introduction of disc brakes in cars came from their development for use in stopping aeroplanes when landing.
In a world increasingly dominated by data, it’s crucial to remember that while numbers provide valuable insights, they should not be blindly trusted. True wisdom often lies in the delicate balance between data-driven analysis and the intuition honed through experience and learning from mistakes.
Chess is a game where a grand master has a store of intuition gathered and sorted by years of practice that is leveraged instinctively when playing.
Sep 16, 2024 | Branding, Communication
‘Marketing’ & ‘Communication’ are two words that should not be compounded. They have entirely different meanings.
The confusion of meaning amongst quasi marketers is the beginning of wasted marketing budgets. It is also the source of much of the dumb rubbish clogging up the digital pipes.
Following are 4 strategies to increase effectiveness.
Define the objective of the communication.
What seems to happen here is that the tactics become confused with the objectives. This is not about optimising your website, or deciding whether or not to use Facebook ads, it is about creating the outcomes you want. Create demand for a product, generate awareness of the company, attract funding, and many others may be the objectives of a marketing investment, but they are not the tools for implementation. Lack of clarity of objectives, time frame, and performance metrics, is a basic marketing sin. I always advocate for a SMART framework.
Who is the audience?
Having figured out why you are communicating, the obvious next step is who you need to communicate with. Who is your ideal customer, and who do you need to engage to generate a transaction?
Your ideal customer may be hospitals with specialist surgical services. A relatively specific ideal customer, but inside that customer, there are those who sign the order, engineers who assess regulatory compliance, accountants who have control over budgets, and the medical staff who use the product. All have different concerns and motivations, and all require differing communications. Understanding the audiences, crafting messages and selecting the channels by which they will be delivered should be second nature.
What does your audience want and need to hear?
Often these are two different communications. They may want to hear about the prices and delivery times, but they need to hear about the regulatory status, availability, and detailed specifications of the range of options being presented to them.
Your task is to clearly communicate what it is you are offering, the benefit it delivers, and why they should care, along with presenting a call to action that is compelling.
How do you communicate?
What is the tone of the messages, and how do you reach the target is the oldest marketing challenge in the book.
Every successful marketing communication is in some form a story. Do you use drama, comedy, a villain, testimonial, or do you use an academic approach to the copy? This even applies to the blazing headline of a huge price reduction, where that is the only thing in the ad. Even that tells a story to those that see it.
What media is used, newspapers, magazines, social platforms, direct mail, email, digital advertising, face to face? In most cases it will be some combination of these, and many other options available to deliver messages.
While writing this post, it was constantly in my mind that ‘everyone knows this stuff’ and ‘nobody out there needs to be told, again, how to suck eggs’.
However, the weight of crap I see floating across the web, and sadly into my inbox, unsolicited, told me otherwise.
I am confident nobody reading this needs to hear it again, but perhaps you could share it to your less enlightened comrades.
If you want to get noticed, lift your game!
Header illustration via DALL-E in 5 seconds.
Sep 12, 2024 | Sales, Small business
Imagine the difference.
You go into a sales call and the first item on the agenda is the price. The potential buyer knows that the price stated is the price, without variation. The whole conversation therefore is about quality, delivery, and all the other things that make up value to the buyer. It may also save you time by quickly eliminating those for whom the price is beyond their budget or expectations.
On the other hand, when you go into a conversation with the other party believing that price is negotiable, the whole conversation then becomes about price, and not about all the other elements that create value for both parties.
What if we’re undercut by a competitor you cry?
Inevitably that will happen from time to time.
Get used to it.
Two strategic questions about price to ask yourself:
- Do I want this customer who is prepared to swap supplies for a few bob in the absence of the other services that we provide?
- Who is it that this competitive supplier is overcharging that we should be talking to?
Most sales conversations I have seen default to debates on price. This does no party any good, as price is only one element of value.
As Benjamin Franklin noted: The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten’.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Fishburne at Marketoonist.com. Thanks Tom!.
Sep 9, 2024 | Governance, Leadership, Strategy
Amongst the tsunami of gratuitous advice on the web about how to manage remotely, whether you be the team leader, or a team member, there is a critical piece missing.
Depth of strategic thinking.
Regular and managed team video gatherings, as well as a range of individual catch ups for assistance, follow up, mentoring, and all the other things that go on, are tactical.
Particularly in times of crisis and high stress, it is sensible and natural to focus on tactical execution. However, tactical can only take you so far, and in the absence of a strategic framework, can lead you astray quickly.
Consider breaking out specific sessions for the discussion of the strategic issues and questions that emerge. They remain in place irrespective of the current crisis, whatever that may be.
Strategic depth is not something generated in a series of quick meetings. It requires data, forecasts, scenarios and deep discussion and contemplation by people who know the box from the outside, as well as from the inside.
These deeper questions of strategy usually reside in the ‘very important but not urgent‘ basket. In the absence of being addressed, they will be forgotten. Worse still, they will be over-ridden by short term tactical outcomes that would not have been allowed to evolve with sensible strategic oversight in place.
We are social animals, our best work is done when people get together, and together look to solve problems and pressure test assumptions. This takes time and human engagement. Verbalisation of ideas, questions, and explanations is only a small part of ‘Communication’. Face to face, there are a myriad of non-verbal nuances and contextual contributors to ‘communication’ that are lost over Zoom or Teams.
Failing to accommodate these human interactions will destroy your capacity to generate the insight necessary for deep and productive strategic thinking.
Header credit: Tom Fishburne at Marketoonist. Thanks again for encapsulating a difficult idea in a cartoon.
Aug 30, 2024 | Collaboration, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Identifying, building, defending and leveraging competitive advantage has been, and will remain, the foundation of successful marketing.
It is also the essence of strategy: making choices with incomplete information that serve to shape the future to your benefit as it arrives.
The challenge is, the location of competitive advantage has moved, and many, if not most, have failed to pick the move.
Think about it.
Until the early 2020’s, competitive advantage was still all about brand, scale, control of supply chains, access to capital, and the ‘old boys network’. To use Charlie Mungers description, they constituted the ‘Moats’ around successful businesses. Kodak, Xerox, GE, GM, Exxon, IBM, Wal-Mart, P&G, and the banks and insurance companies ran the world on the basis of wide and deep moats built on these 5 factors.
Suddenly, the world moved on.
We watched as a raft of new businesses leveraging the capabilities of the internet took over. Along with the obvious Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Google, Uber, Air BnB, eBay, Netflix, Salesforce, and others that are pure internet plays, you had Apple, Microsoft, and more recently Tesla, combining the connectivity of the net with the ‘old school marketing moats’ in whole new ways.
What made the difference?
Each of the newbies benefitted from network effects.
Those that dropped out of sight did not.
Even some of the tech giants of the very early 2000’s, such as Yahoo and Alta Vista have dropped out of sight because they failed to recognise the potential value they had in their hands. They did not leverage the potential network effects.
Those network effects have two differing core types:
- An ecosystem of complementary, and often partially competitive enterprises that support each other’s efforts. This occurs particularly often in R&D, early-stage commercial development and in logistics and supply chain management.
- Double sided markets, such as eBay, Facebook, and Air BnB, where the value of the offering increases with the number of people connected to it.
The answer to the question posed in the header: in your networks!
On a simple scale you see it all the time in retail. The specialist shoe shop in the mall collaborating and cross promoting with the fashion dress shop.
Your networks will build as you create value for others greater than the cost of being a part of the network.
