If I was going to recommend just one piece of research to my clients - or indeed any business - without hesitation it would be this: Find out who buys your product. It’s a fairly common...
Read moreWe live under the illusion of control. We believe that we design our lives, we design our companies, we design culture, and we design human civilisation itself. The way we do this, according...
Read moreThanks 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...
Read moreAll 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 -...
Read moreA couple of years ago I heard an executive from Quorn speak at a conference. Normally talks like these are just boring propaganda pieces, but his was usually thoughtful and candid. One point...
Read moreWhen 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...
Read moreCoke 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 which...
Read moreAll startup brands are the same. This was the implication of a Bloomberg article about the rise of what it called “the blands” - the army of VC backed DTC brands you see everywhere...
Read moreThere are only two kinds of value offering a business can make: 1 - Enhancing an existing value the market 2 - Bringing a new value to the market Generally speaking, 1 is weak and 2 is...
Read moreWhen 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...
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