All posts tagged: leadership

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 …

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 …

The portfolio approach to strategy

The portfolio approach to strategy

By Mark Di Somma

How do you drive home a strategy to fulfil your future, when everything around you is changing?  The secret, according to McKinsey & Co senior advisor, Eric D. Beinhocker, is to radically review what we mean by strategy. In his 2006 book, The Origin of Wealth, Beinhocker argues that rather than thinking of strategy as a single plan built on predictions of the future, we should think of it as a portfolio of experiments, a population of competing business plans that exist within the decision making process but evolve over time.

The business of cloning

By Mark Di Somma

There has been a carbon copy approach to business for some time, and business schools are  at least partly to blame. Management is now a taught vocation. OK – we all have to learn, but the problem is that everyone’s taught the same things and taught to work in the same ways. Same ideas. Same principles. Same rules. As Dr Dan Herman observes, “All  those managers who are supposed to compete with one another … are using the same data; they conduct the same focus groups and the same surveys, analyse the data with the same tools, and use the same concepts and approaches in order to create distinctive products and brands. The result? … [they] achieve the same results, simply because they think the same way. In other words, they are MBA clones.” Today, we teach process rather than the ability to process information. We form models rather than opinions. We rely on frameworks rather than asking people to extrapolate by drawing on experience. In this context, differentiation is a risk. Too many managers, …

Credentials as comfort food

By Mark Di Somma

How does the fact that I’m travelling on the world’s biggest airline change my travelling experience? Or the world’s biggest cruise liner? How does the fact that I’m working with the world’s biggest professional services firm change what I get from the lawyer, accountant, engineer etc assigned to me? What more do I get from buying a bottle from the world’s biggest winemaker? Or a toy from the world’s biggest department store? It makes no difference. And yet brands love to emphasise their size or the number of countries they operate in or the projects that they’ve been involved in. They think it provides reassurance. They think it gives them a storyline. It doesn’t. It gives them big numbers but in most cases, it says nothing at all. Credentials in my view are much over-used and much over-rated. They don’t add to the excitement that consumers feel. And, given the complexity of most corporate structures, it could be argued that they often don’t ameliorate the risk of dealing with many entities. Credentials might feel important …

Highs and lows: the new value equation in the social economy?

By Mark Di Somma

The dynamics of customer service are shifting. Not so long enough, the ultimate goal was to deliver customers “high tech, high touch” – a highly digital experience that was nevertheless comforting and personalised. Increasingly that framework is becoming a paradox I believe as brands sort new economic models for dealing with cross-channel customers. The current trend of sift online, buy offline is unsustainable in so many circumstances. High tech is jeopardising the economics of high touch. It encourages customers to price hunt, and then to bargain down prices in a physical environment using what they’ve found online as a cost index. The implied “plus” between high tech and high touch doesn’t work. So I think we’re going to increasingly see it change to “or”. And with that shift will come more delineated choices for consumers. Brands will seek to attract customers by experience or by engagement. In fact, the separation of those two thoughts – engagement (focused on cost conscious availability) and experience (focused on one-on-one immediacy) is interesting because it suggests that rather than …

The new take on redundancy

By Mark Di Somma

In a world where we’ve never been so aware of being watched, everyone wants to “look busy”. Actions are good for that. Actions help everyone look like they’re working hard to get to the answers. And along the way it’s very easy to believe you are doing things right, and therefore you have a strategy, when in fact you are simply part of what the market’s doing. If the market’s growing, it’s not a strategy to be there for the ride. A lot of companies told a lot of people over the last decade that they had sound strategies proven over time. They didn’t have a strategy at all. They had actions that had kept them busy over time, and those actions were successful as long as the market rose. The key action was to acquire and revalue assets upwards, and then tell themselves and their shareholders that they were creating wealth. The answers are not the actions. And plenty of actions don’t necessarily generate the answers. And yet there’s unswerving faith in many quarters …

The efficiency debacle

By Mark Di Somma

I’m continually fascinated by how much companies ignore context. And the irony of that of course is that this is happening at the very time when we have more access to information than ever before. Ask many companies what they are doing and they will happily tell you. Ask them what they are doing to be more competitive and the answer you get back rarely makes mention of those competitors and why a brand’s actions will stand them apart. It’s easier to act than to distinctualise. And that’s because actions feel like something is happening. Managers monitor their operational improvements, and believe they are future-proofing the business, maybe even outperforming their competitors. But just as quickly as they are improving their actions and becoming more efficient, their competitors are doing the same. In equally splendid isolation. So there’s this strange dichotomy of awareness. Everyone knows how to keep up. But not how to overtake. Continuous improvement is now a hygiene factor in so many industries. Everyone is acting to stay steady with those around them. …