Year: 2017

Escaping business loops

How to unthink the loops and deliver astonishing creativity

By Mark Di Somma

Loops are the things that companies do over and over again. Business as usual. Business as boring. Every business has loops. Some are driven by fear, some by tradition, some by distraction, some by lack of awareness or industry convention. Loops affect how we think, how we work, how far we venture and how we seek to make change. In the process, they stifle creativity. The secret to breaking those loops, and achieving astonishing innovation, is unthinking.

Innovative ideas have varying levels of success

Why some innovative ideas work, and most don’t

By Mark Di Somma

We hear a lot about how fast and how much the world is moving. But when companies pursue innovative ideas to cater to what they think is consumers’ fascination with the new and shiny, reactions can be mixed. The trap for marketers in this is that there are different types of “newness”: from the ‘new’ people queue for, talk about, and go mad on social networks over to the ‘new’ that bewilders, confuses, worries, or even confronts.

Be an excellent business storyteller

How to excel as a business storyteller, now that everyone’s doing it

By Mark Di Somma

Stories are now such a *thing* even in a B2B context that it’s easy to think that every marketer can and should be a business storyteller. Effective business storytelling though is harder than it looks. If you back yourselves to tell an extraordinary story that the people who buy from you will want to specifically engage with (at the expense of your competitors), there are three things you need to organise.

Entrepreneur article

Why branding experts need to step out of their silos

By Mark Di Somma

In our latest article at Entrepreneur, Pete Canalichio and I examine why now, more than ever, the marketing consulting industry should be promoting an interactive brand ecosystem that more closely aligns the disciplines of brand insights, brand strategy, brand protection, brand licensing and brand valuation. The full article is available here. Hope you enjoy it. Feedback welcome.

The challenges of value and valuable

Here’s why creating customer value is so hard

By Mark Di Somma

Customer value is one of the most talked about aspects of marketing today, but many senior decision makers are hard pushed to articulate how exactly their business is creating meaningful customer value and how that tangibly contributes to their business being more valuable and competitive. Even if they can put that into words, a powerful customer value proposition itself is really just the start. Harder still is maintaining customer value over the longer term. Here’s why.

Trusted brands today

Building real brand trust in a world full of fake

By Mark Di Somma

Once, it was easy to build brand trust. You used mass media to establish profile and credibility, you became a “household name” and that was pretty much it. No longer of course. The splintering of channels, new levels of transparency and increasing expectations from customers have made just ‘being’ a trusted brand almost impossible. Trust is now far from a given.