Reading Time: 4 minutes Marketers tend to think of their customers only as those people who purchase their brands – and to distinguish them from people who don’t buy any more or who haven’t bought yet. However, in a world where all manner of consumers are connected, it’s important to pay attention to a number of other groups that […]
Tag: participation
Brands and the power of secrets
Reading Time: 3 minutes Ten years ago, Don Tapscott and David Ticoll’s book “The Naked Corporation” foresaw a time of transparency in which businesses would find themselves more visible and subject to greater scrutiny. They were on the money. But in an age where everyone is more inclined to talk a lot louder and a lot more frequently, have […]
The different scales (and values) of talk
Reading Time: 5 minutes “Everybody’s talking at me. I don’t hear a word they’re saying,” observed Harry Nilsson in 1969. 45 years on, it seems a lot of people are still not listening – but brands should be. New findings from Gallup suggest marketers may be pinning the wrong hopes on social media.
Competitive intelligence – capitalising on other brands’ weaknesses
Reading Time: 5 minutes Every brand has two vulnerabilities from an activity point of view: what it’s doing (because that makes its strategy more visible to its competitors) and what it’s not doing (because in failing to act, it generates opportunities for others to do so). Nothing startling there. But Derrick Daye mentioned something recently that I think we […]
Big brand dynamics: the rise of the super-platforms
Reading Time: 4 minutes Some thoughtful work by John Hagel in this article in which he suggests that economies are increasingly divided by two dynamics – those sectors that are scaling, and those that are shattering. As those dynamics become more radical, the pressures they exert on businesses are also becoming more extreme.
Purpose, People or Profits: The tough choices facing brands today
Reading Time: 5 minutes There are those who continue to frame the role of business in purely commercial terms. Business is hard enough, and the demands of shareholders and the markets so insistent, these people say, that companies need to avoid the ‘distractions’ of infusing a moral platform into what they do. They should just get on with making […]
Rethinking brand reach in a watching world
Reading Time: 3 minutes We need to move on. That’s my take-out from a piece by Tara Walpert Levy – spotted and brought to my attention by the ever-observant Jeremy Dean. We need to move on from a mind-set based on reach and drop-off, and replace it with one centred on engagement and accumulation. “Historically, our media plans have […]
Measuring purpose. The next key business imperative
Reading Time: 5 minutes In the first article in this series on purpose, we looked at the nature of purpose and espoused the view that purpose has two facets: functional (where it describes what the company must get done); and intentional (where it articulates what the company would like to see change in the wider world.) In this article, […]
Brand identity management: why someone will always want to be an exception
Reading Time: 4 minutes Pitch a new brand identity system to almost any large company with multiple divisions and inevitably someone will plead to be an exception to the new rules. This is particularly true where brands or divisions have had their own identity in the past. Attempts to consolidate a myriad of “brands” into a consistent brand identity […]
Hollow brands in an age of scrutiny
Reading Time: 4 minutes We’re all tempted to do it at some stage: to overstate the advantages; to push the benefits of what is on offer past the point of credibility; to state that what we are doing or offering is better than what others are offering, but with no substantiation for that belief.
Brand signals or brand noise? Being heard. Staying heard.
Reading Time: 3 minutes In economics, signalling focuses on the ability of one party to effectively convey information about itself to another party. That was relatively easy pre-Internet. Brands simply pushed claims into the marketplace through a range of set-play media actions and waited for consumers to react. The ability of a signal to reach an audience rested almost […]
The battle between ideas and access
Reading Time: 3 minutes At one level Taylor Swift’s split with Spotify is the story of ongoing upheavals in the music industry and one artist’s approach to contain the impact. At another, it is symptomatic of a struggle for the relationship with the end customer that is going on across much of B2C.