A couple of years ago, when VW last hit the news for doing stupid stuff I wrote about their inaction and lack of willingness to accept responsibility until forced to by regulators. Clearly time has passed but not much changed. There are however (more than) a couple of differences between this recent...
How does a company go from the concrete visual language of “a computer on every desk and in every home” to this? Last week the chief executive of Microsoft Satya Nadella came out with a 1500 word email to all staff “boldly” outlining the future direction of the company. So what...
Just imagine the transformation in attitude and outcome if instead of writing a vision statement, you did a little “visioning”. I’m on a short break this week, but I’ve been party to a whole lot of vision talk lately so here’s one from the archives that might help shine a slightly different...
A week ago, I was part of a panel discussion for some executive MBA students and among the great questions they asked was the following one: You talked about not rebranding but evolving a brand, how do you do that? I believe that brands should always be evolving, just like the environments...
It’s easy to think about purpose (your why) around the big things. What we do. How we do it. Who we do it for. Where we do it. Much harder is to push purpose into the corners of everything you do. I often see organisations sweat the big stuff only to...
I’ve been thinking about, working with and generally immersing myself in what it takes to build a brand for many years now and I’ve always had an internal war going on about which is more important – skill or will. Not that it’s a contest, because in truth you do need...
PART 1 Where does your customer’s experience start? When they walk into your store or wander into your website? When they talk to a sales person? When they go searching for something on Google? When they see or hear your ad? When they use your products or services? Sure these are all...
I was speaking recently at the Better Boards Conference for not-for-profits and the Q&A raised the issue that there is no such thing as an organisation that cannot be for profit of some kind. If you’re not growing by 3%+ a year you’re going backwards and are probably not sustainable. So...
Thanks to everyone for the shares and retweets and feedback on the last couple of blogs – really appreciate it and it is great to see some of the ideas are resonating with others too. This week I’m taking a look at the thorny issue of measurement. I am sure everyone here...
The ‘slow’ movements around the world which began with Slow Food, have since expanded into various areas of thinking and doing underpinned by the ideal of taking the time to make a connection. Reading the terrific book Slow Fix by Carl Honoré got me thinking about the idea of “slow brand” (I sense a...