All posts tagged: leadership

Strategy, or resource budget?

By Mark Di Somma

Why have management teams reduced strategy to a compliance matter – something they go away to do once a year. Some have even invented a host of reasons why they can afford to take strategy off their list of tasks. “Strategy is a talk-fest.” “Strategy isn’t real.” “Strategy isn’t practical.” “Strategy is just a fancy name for planning.” In so doing, they have overlooked the creative, pre-emptive and competitive opportunities that great strategy should go looking for. In an interview with McKinsey Quarterly in November 2007, Professor Richard Rumelt of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, says most corporate strategic plans don’t deserve the name. Far from being strategies, they are actually three-year or five-year rolling resource budgets tied to a market share projection (designed, I imagine, to appease shareholders’ demands for dividends). Calling this strategic planning, Rumelt says, creates  false expectations that the exercise will somehow produce a coherent strategy. Amen to that. Great strategy is not about all talk and no action or the talk before the action. I  don’t think it’s about just …

Know thy enemy

By Mark Di Somma

I’m a great believer in brands having enemies. Here’s why. Enemies draw people of a common mind together. Enemies activate people to want to do something. Enemies provide a clear and present focus. Your enemies are not competing brands. Well, not directly anyway. Your enemies are the ideas that compete with, or conflict with, your purpose – specifically, they are ideas that run contrary to what your brand believes in and aspires to. An enemy could be another belief or an assumption. It could be an action or a way of working. It could be a state of the world. It could be a system. It could be an injustice or an intolerance. Whatever it is, it is something that your brand fundamentally opposes and want to change because your values dictate that it is necessary for you to do so. Tom’s has an enemy: bare feet. A fundamental tenet of the Tom’s brand is that it is unacceptable for children not to have shoes. Apple has an enemy: mass produced boredom. As a brand …

Great brands unearth

By Mark Di Somma

In his recent post on imputing, Tom Asacker used a single word that for me clinched the mystery and the power of great marketing, and explained why so much money is spent on communication that just inspires a change of channel. That word: unearth. Unearthing is about discovering. It’s about seeing for the first time something that has been hidden for a very long time. It’s about revelation. It’s about something that inspires. Great brands release emotions that people are not asked to feel most of the time. They uncover the irrational drivers that impel busy, pressed, distracted human beings to stop doing nothing or something else and instead make the time to take an action. Because that action is worth it to them. And it’s worth that time because it feels worth that amount of time. Most brands don’t work that hard to win our time. They are unsurprising, uninspiring, unprovoking. They unearth nothing. On the contrary, they monotonously state the obvious. They go over and over and over the same old ground. And …

Rethinking the response

By Mark Di Somma

There’s a simple, human reason why behaviours happen time and time again in my view.  We are creatures of habit and familiarity. It is much more comforting to keep hammering away at what we know than it is to stop, reappraise the problem and completely redesign the playbook. Relentless speed and ubiquitous impatience have spawned an approach to strategy based on “not enough time”. The underpinning philosophy is that there’s either not enough minutes in the day to do the thinking, or even if these can be found, the strategy will be outmoded by the time the company gets to implement it. Wrong. It will almost certainly take far less time to strategise the road ahead than it took to get into trouble. And it will cost a whole lot less than reacting to another bad snap decision. However, those who hate change can always fall back on a simple tactic. If in doubt, raise more doubt … “What if it doesn’t work?” “But it’s not working now.” “OK, what if it works even worse?” …

The power of being purposeful

The power of being purposeful

By Mark Di Somma

In an age where products are increasingly similar and of equal quality, the opportunities to compete just on the basis of what you sell are disappearing. In fact, I’d go further than that and say, they’re as good as gone. Even if you know that your product has some sort of technical advantage over that of a rival, the chances of you continuing to hold that advantage or of that advantage being of such significance that consumers actually care are as good as nil.

“What are we going to do?”

By Mark Di Somma

It’s been said on too many occasions that actions speak louder than words. Said so often in fact, that many brands today seem to have a disregard that borders on disdain for taking the time to really think through what could make them outstandingly competitive. In today’s manic, results-driven world, fewer and fewer people, it seems, feel they have time to strategise where their company and their brand needs be heading, and how to retain their edge. It’s better instead, they believe, to just get on with the business at hand. Everything happens now. And as a result, considered is an idea that seems to have passed its use-by date. Execution is the mot du jour. The best way to solve any problem is to do something. In fact, not just something, lots of things. Kevin Roberts calls this, “ready, fire, aim”. I call it stupid. Looking to reaction and sheer activity to get you out of trouble relies on the fallacy that doing something has got to be better than doing nothing. In fact, …

Market leadership: you can’t lead as a brand if you follow another brand.

By Mark Di Somma

Looks to me from this article like Samsung are going down the same competitive route as others before them in their battle with Apple. They’re looking to out-do them and to build a reputation and loyalty for themselves that replicates the following that Apple has. Here’s the thing. As soon as any brand does this, there’s a very real risk that what it is actually doing is fighting with its perceived nemesis on their terms and therefore, subconciously or not, by their strengths. Because of the underlying references, Apple also becomes a focus and therefore, by implication, an authority. And all this within time and space that Samsung is paying for and looking to own. Unless they are very careful, there’s a real risk here that Apple could be allowed to Occupy Samsung’s marketing real estate – by Samsung itself. After all, Apple is very good at being Apple. And their consumers love them for the brand they are. It’s not smart brand strategy to address a strong brand competitor at their strongest points. If …

Participation versus differentiation

By Mark Di Somma

Right now, across the world, hundreds of different people are opening an office, a restaurant, a social media company … They’ve sunk everything they have into it. They’ve thrown their life at it. It’s what they’ve always wanted to do, and every one of them and the people who has supported them hopes and believes they’ll succeed. Most won’t. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is planning a business that will one day be bigger than every other brand in their sector. The next shipping magnate woke up somewhere in the world today, without a ship to their name. The property magnate of the future is eating lunch in a schoolyard somewhere. Tomorrow’s Madonna has a clothesbrush, a mirror and perhaps an i-Pod … The contrast couldn’t be greater, and yet curiously, the two groups are interdependent. Because in order for someone to stand out in a market, the vast majority must fail to do so. If every café that opened stayed open, the hospitality sector would collapse because no-one could succeed, no-one could …