How many customer touchpoints do you actually need?
As brands juggle more and more channels to try and interact meaningfully with customers, are all these touchpoints helping or hindering?
Year: 2018
The absolute need to challenge (even if you’re not a challenger brand)
Every day, business owners are pitched opportunities to take their brands in a ‘new’ direction or to stay the course—by colleagues, by their agencies, because of the actions of competitors or by delegations of customers or suppliers. When everyone has a tactic and everything is presented as a panacea, how do you sift the wheat from the wonk? How should brands commit to their future? The secrets I suggest here are singularity, over-commitment and a fundamental drive to keep challenging.
18 ways you can systematically succeed as a change maker
Many of us are change makers in one form or another, even if we don’t identify ourselves as such right away. But it’s one thing to advocate for change and quite another to bring that change successfully through to realisation. In complex organisational structures with multiple stakeholders, the make or break, it seems, is socialisation.
Fears are powerful buying motives. Should we be scared?
Plenty of companies have built their brands on promises based on addressing fears – the needs for protection, for reassurance, for status, for achievement, recognition and so on – in a world where so many of those things are portrayed as being at risk. But how successful is fear as an emotive driver today and should we still be using it as a motivation to get people to buy more stuff?
Why are so many customer experiences now just marketing sugar?
It’s easy to see why customer experiences have become marketers’ go-to fix. Like content marketing they are such an accepted part of the lexicon today that many marketers have them on their to-do list as a matter of course.
Should you scale or should you grow?
In our latest article for Entrepreneur, Pete Canalichio and I explore the different demands of scaling your business vs growing your business. Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses. Each works better in some sectors than others. Each has its own dynamics and makes its own demands. The full article is available here. Hope you enjoy it. Feedback welcome. Other articles I’ve written/co-written for Entrepreneur: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Disruption Don’t Brand for Now, Brand for “Then” Why Branding Experts Need to Step Out of Their Silos