If you have competitors, then you’re not doing it right
No well designed business should have competitors. Other companies in the same general category? Sure. But not competitors – other companies who your customers consider to be “viable alternatives” to dealing with you. Your goal instead should be to create a form of “micro-monopoly” within your category, where only you provide the specific value you […]
United enjoyed a record quarter after dragging that guy off their plane
Yup, this surprised me too. Following “the PR disaster to end all PR disasters” that occurred when footage was released of United Airlines forcibly removing David Dao from one of their flights due to overbooking, one might have thought that the carrier would receive some sort of retribution for their sins. I mean, all sorts […]
How to bring your people with you
To become the kind of inspiring business that wins friends and fans in the modern world is a team effort. We can’t just bring in a hot shot marketing director and expect them to “do” some great marketing for us – instead we have to make everyone marketers, all working creatively towards a perfectly defined and […]
How should we organise our marketing departments?
Sometimes the old ways are indeed the best. You might be familiar with the concept of the four, or latterly seven “ps” that comprise marketing – product, price, promotion, place, process, people, physical environment. Whilst this list has been around for a long time (the original variation cropping up around 1960), it actually represents a […]
Purpose is broken – here’s how to fix it
This piece originally appeared in Campaign. Every brand has been created for a reason. That reason can generally be found in the value they provide that people are prepared to pay money for. Your local coffee shop, for instance, is there so that people in a very particular vicinity can get coffee. They are providing […]
KFC complaints show that advertising is not an exercise in wish fulfilment
This piece first appeared in The Drum. Haven’t our mothers always told us that the best way to get people to like us is simply to be ourselves? The wisdom of this old cliché can take a long time to dawn on us, but at some point in our lives we tend to wake up […]
When it comes to selling, facts are good, emotions are better – but emotional facts are dynamite
Essentially there are two ways that most brands approach advertising. First we have the “rational” approach, the approach which seeks to sell with a reasoned argument using the features and benefits of the product. Probably the purest form of this advertising is the infomercial – so called because it peddles in, yup, information. When Joy […]
A business should be a creative brief
A creative brief – for those lucky enough to have never worked in marketing – is a document that advertising agencies give to their creative teams to prompt them to create exciting, on-message ideas. As you can imagine, it’s something that’s pretty important to get right. Get it wrong and not only is it […]
How To Write A Tagline That Transforms A Business
The formula for creating a business that will succeed in today’s post-advertising marketing is pretty simple. Firstly establish a coherent purpose for your business (and contrary to popular wisdom this doesn’t have to be anything particularly worthy, it just needs to be reasonably exciting and unique). Secondly, take that purpose and use it to develop […]
Do marketing departments stand in the way of great marketing?
This piece first appeared in Management Today. Type Coca-Cola into Google and you get 160 million results. Being extremely charitable, Coke probably didn’t create more than 1% of that information, meaning that the genuine life of the brand exists entire out of its hands. As Jeff Bezos said, your brand is what other people […]