applied know how
It’s an apt metaphor for businesses.
We fool ourselves thinking that we bring customers in, and that they stay with us for ever and as they stay with us we can sell them more and grow.
It’s a nice picture… but completely wrong. Your business is a bucket. You attract new customers they fall into your bucket. You switch your competitor customers and they fall into your bucket… but Customers also leave.… Read more
Five years ago Binet & Field shot to marketing effectiveness fame with the launch of their first book – The Long and Short of It, a long term analysis of business effectiveness case studies from the 1980s through to the present day.
The title is a reminder of the marketers biggest challenge investing for today vs investment for tomorrow. How much should you focus on sales activation compared to brand image building inn a B2B environment. … Read more
I am embarking on a new teaching topic that of enhancing strategic growth in Asia- and this excites me. a typical approach is to survey the field, identify what market leaders are doing and identify how to benchmark against and replicate this.
The challenge I have is this;
The most profitable ideas are contrarian ideas.
The value of contrarian thinking is well understood especially in the world of finance, but much less well understood in the commercial world of business where benchmarking remains a standard approach.… Read more
When I was younger, growth was easy to achieve. We had a number of tail winds that helped the economy grow as a matter of course. We didn’t need to do much, just stay in business and the economy grew around us.
Now… not so much.
The tail-winds which aided us in the past have turned into headwinds. How so?
Here are five critical reasons why productivity growth continues to be lacklustre despite all the benefits we reap every day from the digital revolution:
1.… Read more
As Mark Twain never said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you think you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Over the course of this year and next, the biggest economic risks will emerge in those areas where investors think recent patterns are unlikely to change.
They will include