Reading Time: < 1 minute I walked into one of my favourite haunts and they were busy – OK, frantic. Waiting staff were running everywhere trying to get things done, serving people they didn’t know, trying to make a good impression. I got my coffee – and nothing else. No hello, no eye contact, no sign of recognition. Just my […]
Tag: actions
Blinkpoints
Reading Time: 2 minutes Paul Marsden’s piece on “Thinking Fast and Slow” (thanks Hilton Barbour) raised some great marketing implications from Daniel Kahneman’s work that are well worth reading.
Setting responsible goals
Reading Time: 2 minutes Far from increasing the daylight between itself and another brand, companies that are fixated on achieving an objective can do themselves, their brands and their reputations serious harm. Pushing the wrong boundaries can push a brand over the edge. This is of course anathema to conventional management theory which has preached for some time that […]
Thinking beyond brand doing
Reading Time: < 1 minute No matter how successful your brand is now, it will probably die. That’s the forecast from Jim Collins in this insightful article about life and death on the Fortune 500. In it he points out that over 2000 companies have appeared on the list since its inception in 1955. But of the 500 that appeared […]
The fallacy of frantic
Reading Time: < 1 minute Being busy doesn’t make you invincible. It just makes you … busy, for now. Except of course being rude to your customers or not returning their calls or treating them like they’re expendable, or doing the one hundred other things we’re all tempted to do when we’re busy isn’t just a now thing. It’s a […]
Branding behaviours not just products
Reading Time: 4 minutes Dr Gerrard Gibbons once shared this wonderful insight: “Every day, brands make bets on human behaviour”. He’s absolutely right – but it’s a confronting thought because, at first airing, it puts so much of what marketers do at risk and beyond our control.
Developing a re-liking strategy
Reading Time: 6 minutes Some brands and some sectors have baggage. They’re seen as bad. Or they have a reputation for behaving badly. Or they are still trying to win back confidence after a disaster. Or they’re part of a sector that people don’t like. Or a segment of the population would like them to go away. For whatever […]
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 […]
Brand controversy: how far is too far?
Reading Time: 2 minutes If your goal is to get people talking and you deliver thought-provoking advertising and that happens, then you have succeeded. Controversy often works if you’re a challenger brand trying to upset a rival; if you’re a NGO trying to incite action; if you share opinions with your customers and you choose to share those opinions […]
Let’s sack “dumb” HR
Reading Time: 4 minutes For all the talk of the need for talent and the huge dependence on human capability to compete effectively, HR for the most part is still a dumb industry. It’s dumb not because the people responsible for it are dumb but because the processes of control and conform that worked so neatly in the factory […]
Brand actions are not the same as brand strategy
Reading Time: 2 minutes Actions are not strategies. Great strategies change more than where you are, what you call yourselves, what you offer. That’s Michael Porter’s thought. Great brand strategies re-invent the emotional context within which your brand competes against others in the marketplace. That’s mine. A great brand strategy redefines the relationship that people have with a brand […]
Hooked on Brands: A (Short) Virtual Coffee™ with Nir Eyal
Reading Time: 4 minutes Nir Eyal spent years in the video gaming and advertising industries. I first became aware of his work through his articles (his work can be found in Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic and TechCrunch) and his blog. In the book “Hooked” he promulgates a process that he says successful brands can embed in their products […]