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 [...]
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 [...]
(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. [...]
Every day, business leaders need to realise the potential of their company. They need to grow its value, command healthy margins and gain loyal customers. They do the necessary. They develop their leadership, cut their costs, optimise their supply chains, improve their call-centres... But is it sufficient? How do they get their hands on 'a difference that matters'? How do they bring to [...]
