I’ve just spent a few weeks travelling in China. (Great place by the way, I’d recommend it). But that’s not the point of this blog. The point is that, while there, I was reminded why brand matters. It was the last day of our trip and we were in Kunming, a big city, dreading our [...]
Marketing is fragmenting, breaking apart – a profession divided – and like a divided army, is weaker and less effective as a result. The myriad of disciplines that the modern marketer is expected to understand, become expert in and deploy, usually with some significant investment cost, is considerable. The marketer doesn’t stand a chance to [...]
Any martial artist or yoga bore will tell you how important alignment is. It makes movement economical, reduces injury, and increases effectiveness. So how come so many businesses are catastrophically un-aligned? The most-often cited misalignments we encounter are between IT and business, and between sales and marketing. New research from Miller Heiman shows clearly that ‘world [...]
My goodness, I have had enough of forums and discussions of how brand is changing. To riff Homer Simpson a moment: d’uh. Why wouldn’t it? Everything else is. I’ve been part of this. I spent about five hours one night, a week or so ago, reading and sometimes commenting in a forum called ‘Principles of [...]
I first wrote the following short piece back in 2008. It was reposted in 2011 and I now feel the need to post it again: “I read a great newspaper article, in the Sunday Times business section I think, about Lagships – businesses that deliberately sit back and watch the mistakes that others make before [...]
In business, the past is only useful if you use it to improve current position and adapt to future events. I think the only way to do that is to have an integrated, complete strategic approach across business, brand and content. Some people believe that in today’s changing environment, strategy and planning are useless. But [...]
How times have changed. Today, in our over-crowded, over-analysed, and over branded world, real business/brand values are hard to find. In the nineties and naughties, the search for values became a marketing necessity (everybody has them, so should we), and the rapid growth of brand consultancy/management meant that most purveyors inevitably followed the same prescriptive [...]
Brands and branding are responsible for many of the world’s problems today. Capitalism and globalisation in the form of homogenised corporate monsters rule ok. They get inside our minds and make us do things that, left to our own devices, we would avoid like the plague. Surely brands are therefore clearly evil and almost Orwellian [...]
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