You are not your product
Many projects I work on begin with this rough scenario: Company launches product – sales grow – sales start to plateau – company doesn’t know what to do next The most obvious solution in this situation is to find some sort of “hack” (generally via marketing) to restart growth, but often this isn’t a realistic […]
Know your enemy
A couple of days ago I came across a great anecdote. It concerned the skirmish that broke out in the early 1750s between an Englishman called Jonas Hanway, and the hansom cab drivers of London. Hanway’s crime was being the first umbrella user in the city. Prior to that point umbrellas had only existed in […]
Be what your customers are not
Occasionally I’ve seen it noted that the more normal, safe, and suburban someone’s life, the more gruesome and unpleasant the novels they like to read. There’s a great line in the sitcom Peep Show where socially awkward Mark thinks to himself: “Look at me; I’ve got a girlfriend. A proper girlfriend reading a best-seller about […]
How to go where your competitors can’t
Thanks to the new Netflix drama The Queen’s Gambit (and the fact that new TV shows are starting to slow to a bit of a trickle), there’s been a lot of interest in chess recently. Now in general I think chess analogies map quite poorly onto business – as do those of military and sport. People […]
Why Most Businesses Have No Strategy
All businesses have a brand. All have a product. All have people, sales, marketing, and various other building blocks which add up to “a company”. But not all – in fact very few – have a strategy. I don’t mean to say here that most businesses have bad strategies (though quite a lot do). I […]
Nike and the concept of “cultural innovation”
When I want to make a point about strategy, I often refer to a famous brand in order to do it. So does everyone of course, and because there are so few brands out there who are strategically interesting, the same names always get repeated. To be honest I always feel a bit embarrassed to […]
The journey to irreplaceable: how F&B brands can own their position on shelf
Coke famously started life as a pharmaceutical product. Tiffany’s was a stationery store. Nokia, a paper mill. Together they represent particularly acute examples of a truth that applies to all companies: They evolve into something they didn’t intend. Nobody knows this better than food and bev brands. It’s exceptionally rare for an initial concept to […]
What does a strong value offering look like?
There are only two directions a business can take to build a strong value offering: 1 – Enhancing an existing value the market 2 – Bringing a new value to the market Generally speaking, 1 is weak and 2 is strong. As I’ve argued many times before, delivering a greater degree of something is far less […]
The most important metric
When I was around 15, me and a pal went to see the movie Collateral, starring Tom Cruise. In it Cruise played a colder-than-ice assassin on the streets of a neo-noir Los Angeles. Sufficed to say we were pretty impressed. So much so in fact that my friend briefly experimented with modelling his personal […]
The most powerful market force nobody talks about
The other day on Twitter, a chap asked a perfectly reasonable question: “Zoom is now worth $130B and I still don’t know what their moat is. Brand?” His question is a variation of the critique that has been put to many a founder when seeking investment. “What’s to stop someone coming and copying you?”. The […]