There’s a lot of ink spilled these days about a thing called customer centricity. All over the place organisations are calling on their employees to be more “customer-centric”. And amidst a whole jargon filled lexicon of customer experience related terms this one puzzles me the most. Stripping back the jargon, a...
Unexpectedly and delightfully I ran into my friend @AJKulatunga yesterday. We always have great conversations and this one quickly ranged into the uncomfortable necessity of discipline in successful businesses. Discipline is a fairly unsexy concept bringing to mind images of soldiers on the drill field and the early morning training grind...
I’ve written previously about the importance and value of culture to the business and the brand. And often that unintentionally leads down the path of it being more important than other things. There’s a good article on Fast Company that illustrates why that isn’t so. Bob Frisch makes the case that “Culture...
I was asked one of my least favorite questions last week. “Can you give me some examples of what other people are doing?” It’s pretty easy to get distracted and enamored by what other organisations are saying and doing. And to take the next step of trying their ideas on for...
There are lots things that really annoy me. One that routinely lands high on that list is the way the term brand gets elevated to some kind of supernatural being with extraordinary powers to do things. You will have read the headlines, heard the commentary. The brand did … the brand...
This week is all about what I called “the third element” of brand – your positioning. It’s the element of brand that’s most often treated as key basis for marketing, but I take a different view and think it should go much deeper than that. I like the general Free Dictionary definition...
The moral of this story is… Over the years that I’ve been writing for SmartCompany there have been plenty of tales of woe. Of organisations that, for any number of reasons, made the news for all the wrong reasons. But as with any tale there is always a moral to the story. So this...
It is easy to get lost in the labyrinth of business motivation – vision, mission, promise, purpose goals, cause, reason to believe, but whatever you call it, the role it should play is pretty simple – it is the foundation of what drives your organisation. What’s your purpose? To your customers,...
The first step to brand alignment is getting the foundations right. One thing that truly irks me is the idea that you need a separate set of things to define what that is. Because when I talk about the foundations of brand, I’m not talking about a whole separate raft of things...
One of the first things I say when talking with groups about brand is that they need to forget what they think they know – that brand is part of marketing. In the process I often find myself caught in a kind of brand gotcha game. Let me explain. Over the...