All posts filed under: Leadership

Reporting season

By Mark Di Somma

Excuse the extended silence. Reporting season is an all consuming time of year for me. In addition to actually writing a number of annual reports, I do a lot of travelling and lots of meetings with senior managers. I look forward to it every year. People are often perplexed. You’re into brands, they say. Why do you want to write annual reports? They position this as if it’s an either/or. I’ve never seen it that way. After all, what are brands for if not to generate profits for investors? Their question also implies annual reports are just a writing exercise. Again, I’ve never seen them that way. To me, annual reports are cues to sit down with decision makers one on one and quizz them in detail about what they did, why, what happened and what it all means at year end. I get to understand something of how the business worked over the last 12 months. And I get to hear the stories from the inside. It’s a chance to talk through the dynamics …

Market leadership: why innovation needs to engage, not just impress

By Mark Di Somma

Blair points me in the direction of Booz & Company’s 2011 Global Innovation 1000 for some interesting insights as to why innovation works for some and not for others. (Thanks Blair.) According to Booz & Co, innovation spending increased in 2011 to $1.15 trillion globally. The 1000 companies that Booz & Co surveyed represented almost half this spend and in the last year their innovation spend was up 9% on the previous year. However, what interested me was the news that the companies that spent the most were not necessarily those that got the most out of their innovation investment. In fact, the top 10 innovators (Apple, Google, 3M, GE, Microsoft, IBM, Samsung, P&G, Toyota and Facebook) out-performed the top 10 spenders in three key metrics: revenue growth; EBITDA and market capitalisation. So innovation can work but it doesn’t always work, and it doesn’t work the same for all. What really counts is the context in which innovation is applied. According to the report, 44 percent of companies who reported that their innovation strategies are clearly …

Market adjacency

Market adjacency – have you asked the two key questions?

By Mark Di Somma

The model for achieving ambitious growth is well documented: a combination of organic and inorganic growth that sees companies looking to gain market share at the expense of their competitors in markets they already occupy, as well as looking for inorganic growth through an adjacent market strategy and/or prospecting for high-return greenfields markets beyond that. Organic growth often stems from increasing brand likeability within the industry that your consumers already associate you with. In today’s economy, in most sectors, it’s a zero-gain scenario. In order for you to win market share, someone else has to forfeit. There are at least two other options for organic growth that we should discuss. You can look to specialise within a market – selecting niches and tapping them for profit. It’s not always the easiest way to find above-market margin, but it’s certainly an option in sectors where specific skill adds value and the field is swamped with middle-market generalists. Or you can look to pincer your middle market competitors by having offerings on either side of them – …

Strategy: 11 ways to purposefully achieve growth

By Mark Di Somma

You can’t build a sustainably purposeful culture it seems to me without having a deliberately purposeful strategy. Part of the problem of course is that, traditionally, strategy and purpose have lived in different parts of the organisation. My suggestion is that they shouldn’t, and that instead of simply allocating purpose to culture and strategy to planning, the business, the strategy and the culture all need to stem from the company’s driving purpose – its absolute reason for being. That in turn means that the purpose must be much more than a wish list or a broad hypothetical goal. It must be inspiring, engaging, profit-focused and it must work hard to stand the company apart from its competitors. Here’s how I use purpose and beliefs to drive distinctive business direction. 1. What is our core purpose (rather than just what is our core business)? When people think of our brand, what is their blinkpoint (the first association that snaps into their heads)? Are they aligned? 2. Why do people buy from us? How have we made …

The new role of marketing

By Mark Di Somma

The reason why companies have worked photocopy business plans for so long is because they never thought to work any other way. It just seemed too risky. The rise and rise of producer nations, in the words of Michael Porter, “rivetted attention on implementation”. Watching Japan, then China and India continue to progress, many companies fell further into the action trap. They believed that the only way to outrun their immediate competitors and their looming Asian rivals was to, somehow, out-do them. But as Michael Porter has commented: “It’s incredibly arrogant for a company to believe that it can deliver the same sort of product that its rivals do and actually do better for very long … It’s extremely dangerous to bet on the incompetence of your competitors” – and that, he says, is what companies are doing when they rely on operational effectiveness for competitive advantage. My sense is that operational effectiveness and efficiency currently account for about 50 – 70% of perceived competitive advantage, but that percentage is falling. It’s falling, because of …

Does my brand look big in this?

By Mark Di Somma

As marketers, we’re often encouraged to puff up our brands to look as big as possible so that they appear significant and credible in a global marketplace. There’s a sense that if you’re big, you must be successful and if you’re successful, then there’s a higher than likely chance that you’ll continue to grow. Size matters. But not always in the senses that we have been led to believe. My own view is that the size of your business is actually less critical than the scale and/or extent of your thinking. A big brand on the hoof is a thing of beauty, to be sure. Strong, assured, competitive, resourced and focused on bringing its vision of the future to life. Big brands command presence and respect. But the biggest companies aren’t always the smartest, they’re not always the pace setters and they’re certainly not infallible even though they might like to think they are. I have only to direct attention to the GFC to remind all of us that neither history nor size counts as …

Market leadership: the -out and the -est

By Mark Di Somma

Two thoughts that I really like, brought together. The first was one introduced to me by Rob Smith, CEO, Paper Plus back in August 2008. It’s called –est. It goes like this: There are a very small number of fully competitive positions in a sector and you need to own, and align yourself, to one: Quickest Biggest Cheapest Coolest Specialist. Anything else is the middle ground. Everyone I raise this with debates the number and raises other possibilities. But you get the idea. It’s superlative and competitive and combative. To me, this is the –est test in brand positioning. Who are you going to be? And are you sure, are you really sure, you want to be that? Second thought, introduced recently by Seth Godin in this post.  Out-. You win when you: Outsmart Outlead Outcare Outlisten Outconnect He gives others. They’re fabulous of course. To me, they are the market leading opportunities. They signal how you intend to win. I think this question brings the two together: Who are you going to out-______ in …

Handpicked – the wider opportunity of curation

By Mark Di Somma

The first time I really thought about the role of an astute retailer was while watching Mary Portas. Her point: any retailer can stock. Smart and profitable retailers, by contrast, handpick items that their shoppers will crave – and that is where they add value. In a great shop, she was saying, you don’t just come to buy, you come to discover things you wouldn’t normally find housed together. Fine point, well made. These days, curation is all the rage. As Trendwatching so rightly observed in an article aptly titled “Everyone’s a curator now”, what used to pass for selecting, choosing or finding (Didn’t we once call that editing?) has been transformed into the more scholarly-sounding art of curating. That’s hardly surprising, Trendwatching observes, given the massive levels of choice that consumers now face, nor it is actually that new. In fact, the idea morphed out of the art galleries more than a decade ago, and really picked up pace with the arrival of Facebook, iPod playlists and Flickr. To Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation …

Not a problem: success pivots on what you solve, not just what you know

By Mark Di Somma

If you’re not a fan yet of the Scattershot blog, then I’d like to suggest you should be. In a post published earlier this week, Rajant discusses the concept of “ground truth”. Ground truth, as its name suggests, is the view on the ground that verifies and informs the satellite view. It’s a great way to separate a problem from a truth. What’s interesting about this is that the perspective that brands have of situations gained from afar can be very different from the reality closer to home. In fact, those on the ground may not see that they have an issue at all. That’s a significant hurdle when your cue for action is something your audience doesn’t recognise. Rajant gives the telling example of P&G’s launch of Febreze, which initially failed. The reason? You only need an air freshener if you understand that you are surrounded by bad smells. The problem with that: “even the strongest odours fade with continual exposure … And Febreze’s reward (an odourless home) was meaningless to someone who couldn’t …