Reading Time: 3 minutes When Al Ries took aim at McDonald’s decision to broaden their menu, saying that introducing more items had not worked as a strategy and would not so do into the future, his piece raised questions for me on the differences between diversification and adjacency.
Tag: branding strategy
Seven signs your brand is losing focus
Reading Time: 4 minutes Everyone’s torn this way and that. It’s easy to lose concentration or to find yourselves prioritising the wrong things. If your brand feels like it’s drifting, here’s 7 sure signs that you’re not focusing on the right things.
Judging your brand distance
Reading Time: 4 minutes Distance is an interesting concept in brand positioning terms. How closely you look to cluster with others and how determined you are to remain some way away depends on your strategy and what you stand to gain from getting up-close.
Podcast w/ Nick Westergaard at Brand Driven Digital
Reading Time: < 1 minute
Longer term planning in a world of spontaneity
Reading Time: 3 minutes Ever since the GFC, global markets seem to have become more volatile. Oil prices rise and crash; China’s growth soars and slides. When market dynamics are this dramatic, how should you look to effectively develop a longer term plan for a business in a world of spontaneity? Do you go with the ebb and flow, […]
Presentation: Go big, go small or go home
Reading Time: 2 minutes As the middle market takes a battering in many sectors, size matters more than ever. It matters up and it matters down – because the positioning options themselves are becoming more extreme. You either expand to compete regionally or globally or you go the other way entirely and focus on specific opportunities.
Brand strategy vs creative strategy
Reading Time: 3 minutes Often, when people in agencies talk about brand strategy, what they are meaning is the thinking that has led to the work they have been doing on the brand. That’s not brand strategy, it’s creative strategy. Both are important – but they are not the same.
5 ways to make sure your brand stays relevant
Reading Time: 5 minutes One of the hardest judgment calls for brand managers is relevance. Brands must change to stay consistent yet they must also remain recognisable in order to preserve brand equity. So what should you change, and when?
There’s a yawning chasm between brand theory and brand practice
Reading Time: 4 minutes As marketers we come close to taking brands for granted. But while many would say they now get the theory, the practice of brand-building is not as simple as they might like to believe.
Contrasting brand different with brand difference
Reading Time: 4 minutes Differentiation is acknowledged by most as the goal that every marketer should be seeking. But the enthusiasm for the pursuit masks a common misunderstanding – in the context of brand strategy, different and difference are not one and the same.
25 questions every start-up brand should answer
Reading Time: 2 minutes Some searching questions, by way of a guide, for the leaders of companies expecting to build lucrative brands in the years ahead.
Smart ways to win as a small brand
Reading Time: 2 minutes Small brands are edgy, attuned and preferred. That seems to be a common sentiment right now. But there is nothing to suggest that any of this makes it easy to win as a small brand today.