Insights
Strategic thinking for founders.
The brand positioning power of contrarian value 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...
Read moreWhat is strategy, and why are so many businesses missing the boat on it? All businesses have a brand. All have a product. All have people, sales, marketing, and various other building blocks...
Read moreProduct Differentiation Through Rearticulation A 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...
Read moreWhat we can learn from Nike's strategy 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...
Read moreThe path to meaningful brand differentiation Coke famously started life as a pharmaceutical product. Tiffany’s was a stationery store. Nokia, a paper mill. Together they represent...
Read moreWhy most founders fail to build distinctive brands All startup brands are the same. This was the implication of a Bloomberg article about the rise of what it called “the blands” - the army...
Read moreWhat you need to understand to build a strong value offering There are only two directions a business can take to build a strong value offering: 1 - Enhancing an existing value the market 2...
Read moreOwning Your Space And Business Archetype 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...
Read moreBrand Positioning Perspective 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...
Read moreThink Strategically As A Backward-Looking Exercise Strategy is traditionally seen as a forward-looking exercise. This stands to reason since, in the words of my pal Robin Bonn, every strategy...
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