Reading Time: 6 minutes Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) haven’t had it this good for some time. As Jack Trout observed the average tenure not so long ago stood at less than two years. Now it’s close to double that. The reasons why things got so bad, according to Trout, could be attributed to both internal and external forces. Internally, […]
Tag: marketing
Planning to expand your brand? 7 things to consider
Reading Time: 5 minutes As marketing teams finalise plans for the year ahead, the logistics of making growth happen should be strongly influencing the targets you set. Most of us would agree there are four ways to strategise for growth: increase the share you hold in the markets you are strong in; develop new products for those markets; extend […]
8 ways to build a more valuable brand this year
Reading Time: 4 minutes We talk a lot about the pressures on brands to perform and about the difficulties of staying competitive in huge and rapidly changing markets. Nevertheless, global brands experienced a 12 percent increase in value in 2014 – and there are powerful lessons for all those responsible for brands in how they did that. If demand […]
The role of brand in assessing business health
Reading Time: 4 minutes Brand will tell you a lot if you let it. How you brand, what you brand, where you’re found, who buys you and how often … these and many more questions are all things that competitive businesses ask themselves on a regular basis. I see brand as a highly effective lens for assessing the relevance […]
6 ways to keep your lead as a brand
Reading Time: 4 minutes Everyone talks about growth and for the need to become a market leader. But once you’ve become the number one player, then what? What do you do after that to retain the lead you’ve worked so hard to get and that has now made you the target of everyone else’s aspirations?
10 powerful brand leadership strategies
Reading Time: 4 minutes Marketers often talk about brand leadership as if it is one thing. But there are many different brand leadership strategies that a brand can use to distinguish itself in a marketplace. The critical decision for brand owners is deciding how you will lead and why that will work.
Cutting through as a brand
Reading Time: 3 minutes Marketers are under enormous pressure to get cut-through. Thing is – where’s the cut off point? How do you decide whether the claims you’re making are justified and how do you know you have pushed the boat out too far? Putting aside the legal considerations (not my space), here are four simple ways to filter […]
Follow the brand insights
Reading Time: 3 minutes At his presentation at The Un-Conference, Chris Wren included this deceptively simple observation: “Follow the insights,” he suggested, “Wherever they may lead”. I was struck immediately by the extent to which brands don’t. Too often it seems research functions as something of a confirmation bias – reinforcing beliefs that are already deeply held.
The airbrushed brand is dying
Reading Time: 3 minutes The aspiration drive that has dominated how marketers think and what they strive to achieve in building a brand’s mythology is increasingly being seen by consumers as unattainable and fake. Buyers are drawing a line under what they perceive to be airbrushed brands. And the push-back is manifest in everything from the acceptance of imperfect […]
How does a brand outgrow its defining characteristic?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Twitter was built on 140 characters. Even though the limitation was serendipitous, it remains a defining characteristic of the brand in the minds of many. Concise thinking, hash-tagged to provide simple, global connection – there’s the Twitter value equation in a little under half the consigned quota. But the question Carl Miller asks is a […]
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.
Do you really want to be a famous brand?
Reading Time: 4 minutes In a world where popularity is the ‘it’ metric for so many marketers, have you really thought through how your brand would cope if all your wishes came true? If your brand strategy is based on building your popularity, here’s some things you might like to consider as you rush to be noticed.