Nothing is more important to the fortunes of a business than understanding why it matters. How will it make a difference to its customers’ lives? What meaningful contribution will it make, functionally, as a product, and emotionally, as a brand? What’s in it for them? Write this understanding down in a handful of words. Everything else [...]
Businesses need to know that they matter. And why. They need to believe that what they do today matters enough to contribute their fortunes and their sustainability tomorrow. This is the both the promise and the responsibility of strategy. I believe our consultancy matters because: I have the ability to get to grips with the heart of [...]
This article first appeared in the Financial Mail on 8 July 2016. The chicken and the egg of business and brand. Professor Cynthia Montgomery, past head of the Strategy Unit at Harvard, regards purpose as the first step in developing a business strategy. But is that right? There is the chicken and the egg. [...]
This article appeared in the Financial Mail's Redzone on 1 June 2016. The value of brands that push back. The cliché is that products should be silver bullets and that brands should make life as rosy as a possible. But when brands ask people to do their fair share of the work, they make a [...]
When your product works and your brand matters. Every product or service must work. People must find it useful. And beneficial. Otherwise it will enter that brutal phase in the business cycle: creative destruction. But the contribution a product or service makes to society is not limited to its features and intrinsics. Its brand - the stuff "outside of the [...]
This company provides financial services to a sector of South African society largely overlooked by the industry: blue-collar workers. It is these people who stretch themselves to provide for their families and to improve their lot in life. Like many of us, they need a helping hand.
Don't expect a USP. Expect a Repetitive Pleasure. We don't place the USP - the consumer promise - at the heart of everything. We've moved on from that thinking. A USP is the manufacturer talking at the consumer. It's one-way communication. It's rational, intrinsic and insistent on being 'beneficial.' A value proposition makes the consumer a recipient of [...]
This critique first appeared on Bizcommunity.com on 29 January 2016. “Blood, sweat and tears will get you there, but joy… (pause) will take you further,” Jude Laws confides to me, almost personally, in Johnnie Walker’s new campaign. Hmm. What is happening to “Keep walking”? A few years ago, you could see the tinkering going on [...]
(An edited version of this article first appeared in the Financial Mail on 15 December 2015.) Business strategy and brand strategy: the twin strands of a company's DNA. In our experience, a lot of leaders battle to articulate their business’s purpose. They struggle to find what Professor Cynthia Montgomery, the past head of the Strategy Unit [...]
Understand the problem and you'll understand the solution. Ability is Business Management Software. It's like SAP - "The best-run businesses run SAP" - but for smaller companies. Smaller 'enterprises' as they like to say. A decision about a business management system is not taken easily. It's going to be costly and it's going to be disruptive. [...]
