How the Disco Versus Punk Rock Wars of the 1970s Help Us Think About Marketing Today
It’s often hard to look at trends objectively if you’re living through them, but marketers have got to ask themselves whether what they know today will be proven false tomorrow. Disco music was the sound of the summer of 1979: Chic, Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor were at the top of the charts. The Bee […]
We need evidence-based marketing to save us from fads and fashions
It is all too easy to base marketing strategies on hope, fear, what has worked in the past and what others are doing, but the best marketers will hinge their decisions on the facts. In 1836, French physician Pierre Louis conducted one of the first clinical trials in medicine. At the time, the removal of […]
How to be a modern day marketing mystic
Marketers no longer need fortune-tellers or clairvoyants to advise them what will happen in the future, a quick look at Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon’s results suggests where the industry is headed. Since time immemorial, humans have longed to learn what the future holds for them. Soothsayers, fortune-tellers and clairvoyants have targeted that particular market […]
Being seen as an ‘influencer’ doesn’t make you a good marketer: in fact, ‘influencer lists suck’
Marketers should be more concerned with doing their day job and making an impact that way than trying to top a list of marketing influencers. You may have seen that Klout – the influence-scoring app that analysed your presence online and gave you a score about how influential you are – recently closed. Klout may […]
Why Rich People’s Habits Today are the Mainstream Trends of Tomorrow
Rich people used their money to buy bling, now they use it to buy goods and services that give them back their time – and one day, so will we all The 1987 Oscar-winning movie Wall Street, with Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen, is iconic for a number of reasons. First, it was the definitive […]
Want to be a Marketing Success? Change your Mindset.
Marketers are prone to a fondness for their own ideas and beliefs. Erase these from your mindset to succeed. The mind of a marketer can be a delicate thing. We like to think that we’re logical, reasonable and objective in our insight. The truth really is that we’re all bad at being objective. We prefer […]
How to be a Marketing Machiavelli.
The path to leadership doesn’t always match the advice being dished out so perhaps marketers should look elsewhere for inspiration. The biggest challenge for the marketing leaders of the future is making sense of the plethora of literature on leadership.Mmost teaching on leadership is filled with recommendations about being authentic, honest, modest, truthful and never, […]
The (digitally) illiterate CEO
Imagine you are an airline recruiting for a new CEO, and they admitted they did not really know anything about aircraft economics, aircraft leasing or airline distribution. Unlikely they would be hired, I’m sure you agree. It’s just as impossible to imagine any CEO of any retailer openly admitting they did not really understand this […]
Future marketing leaders will need a compass, not a map
In an uncharted world of exponential change driven by technology, marketing leadership means depending on judgement as much as data, and personality as much as skills. When discussing leaders and leadership, it’s a good idea to be clear about definitions. There are 17,623 […]
There are no such things as ‘industries’, only ways of serving the customer need
Short-term thinking will lead brands to disaster. Instead marketers must understand the value their product provides the customer to be better prepared for the future. At some point in its development, every industry can be considered a growth industry, based on the apparent superiority of its product. But in case after case, industries have fallen […]
Friction is the one thing between you and more sales
For many brands, marketing is not really about AIDA (awareness, interest, desire & action). For many brands, its about FAF: friction, typically followed by anger, and collapsing in frustration. Apparently there has been a shift of power from the brand to the customer. We once could dictate how the customer engaged with us, but now […]
Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, & Total Nonsense: Truthiness and Alternative Facts in Marketing.
I believe in evidence based marketing. Too often, I hear just opinion, not fact. Stephen Colbert, the American comedian, coined the word ‘truthiness’ to refer to arguments not based on fact but what we would like to be true. Here is a great quote from him: “It used to be, everyone was entitled to their […]
How can marketers hope to know what is coming around the corner?
Most people reading this can remember what they were doing 10 years ago. But 10 years ago, the Apple iPhone had only just launched. It did not really make an impact initially as the cool kit was the Blackberry Pearl. The number of people with broadband in the world was less than 300 million. Now […]
Five ways to innovate as a marketer
We live in an age of technological acceleration and marketers are on the frontline. New ideas, new channels and disruptive technologies appear to be coming at us exponentially faster. The two most commonly cited responses to this rapid product and technological advancement (or indeed obsolescence) is to ‘disrupt yourself’ or to ‘innovate more’. But what […]
Budgets – a time-consuming exercise of limited value & the most ineffective practice in management
To be frank, I see budgeting as a time-consuming exercise of limited value – and essentially, the most ineffective practice in management. Luckily, there are a few big hitters who agree with me: “budget suck the energy, time, fun, and big dreams out of an organisation. It hides opportunity and stunts growth. It brings out […]
Our biases causes us to be bad marketers
Whenever we try to figure out a future outcome — like ‘will this new product work when I launch it in the market?’– marketers enter a minefield. If it’s a success, should we readily convince ourselves that we understood that this was going to happen, and our sheer greatness as a marketer made it all […]
Chinese New Year: What we can all learn from China in the Year of the Fire Rooster
This last week of January and the first week of February marks Chinese New Year, called the ‘Spring Festival’ in China. Many millions of Chinese people travel back to their families in the provinces to celebrate the festival, the most important holiday in the Chinese calendar. Starting from 28 January, celebrations will continue for around […]
Confessing to heretical marketing beliefs
I have a confession to make. A heresy that I will probably ensure that I get burned at the stake. Or, perhaps, the 21st century equivalent, trolled on Twitter. Most of us marketers should just basically ignore what the top brands are doing. I believe that Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Toyota, IBM, Samsung, Amazon, Mercedes-Benz […]