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Friday, 12 April 2019
Monday, 18 March 2019
How it Works: Value Creation
Value creation is a corporation’s raison d’être, the ultimate measure by which it is judged. Debate has focused on what is the most appropriate type of value for the corporation to create. Is it:
the value that the stockmarket gives the company (its market value);
the value shown in its balance sheet (the accounting or book value of its assets minus its liabilities);
something based on its expected future performance - profits or cash; or
none...
Monday, 4 March 2019
What Do Strategic Marketers Do?
An entrepreneur I met at an event recently asked me "what do strategic marketers do". Now I realise a deceptively simple question like this deserves an equally straightforward answer, but later on it struck me how much the marketing world has changed over the last 20 years.
Twenty years ago you could credibly get away with saying something like "advertising" or "promotions". But today, organisations require so much more from their marketing...
Monday, 25 February 2019
How it Works: The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy
In essence, the job of the strategist is to understand and cope with competition. Often, however, managers define competition too narrowly, as if it occurred only among today’s direct competitors. Yet competition for profits goes beyond established industry rivals to include four other competitive forces as well: customers, suppliers, potential entrants, and substitute products. The extended rivalry that results from all five forces defines an industry’s...
Monday, 18 February 2019
7 Signs Your Strategy Lacks Clarity
Strategic clarity is essential if an organisation is to use its resources wisely to drive superior performance, with higher revenues and profits and a happier workforce the principal beneficiaries.
Below are 7 indicators which suggest a strategy is lacking a clear sense of purpose. How many of these affect you, or the people around you?
Priorities and goals seem to jump around at a moment’s notice
Urgency wins over importance
Many cannot...
Monday, 4 February 2019
Realistically, you can only initially sell a meeting on first contact
In the professional services industry, no matter what sort of sales and marketing strategy you’re employing, chances are none of your individual activities will result in a direct sell. In fact, making a sale shouldn’t actually be your objective. In my experience, it just doesn’t work like that.
The aim of your marketing activities i.e. having an optimised website, running a targeted advertising campaign, implementing a direct marketing programme,...
Monday, 21 January 2019
Sometimes Managers Just Need a Little Outside Help
We know we want leaders who are smart, decisive, transformative, and possessed of a singular vision. But there’s an often-overlooked factor that can make the difference between success and failure: a leader’s ability to go far outside the organization - mobilizing networks of critical expertise - to get help in solving problems</ p>
Outside the organization? Why would the MD of a company with strong capabilities need to look elsewhere...
Monday, 7 January 2019
8 Characteristics of Successful Brands
If you followed Don Draper and the rest of the Mad Men, you might be forgiven for thinking that the inspiration behind a memorable slogan or advertising campaign comes from a bottle of whisky and a packet of cigarettes.
Of course life is never that simple. Take, for example, Apple’s false start with its corporate identity. The company’s first logo, designed in 1976, showed Isaac Newton sitting under a tree with an apple dangling above his head,...
Monday, 10 December 2018
Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners for 2019
If you’re a small or medium-sized business, you don’t have the money to waste on large-scale marketing programmes like your bigger competitors. Neither will you have time to waste on the kind of activities vigourously promoted by hype communities on the web. No, to compete on the same level as larger rivals but on a smaller budget, you have to be smarter with your marketing.
Whatever programmes you put in place, we'd recommend you consider the...
Monday, 26 November 2018
Why You Should Consider Outsourcing Your Marketing for 2019
Most companies have been outsourcing a portion of their marketing function for many years - advertising.
But increasingly, expertise in marketing lies outside the walls of the traditional firm. In research, strategy optimization, multi-channel digital development, customer management and many more disciplines, project work is outsourced to experts. And that’s why more and more companies are turning to marketing partners like Lucidity London.
When...
Monday, 12 November 2018
Marketing Today: Less Bluff, More Puff
Thanks to new digital tools, marketing is no longer voodoo
WHEN a power cut interrupted this year’s Super Bowl, advertisers lit up. “Sending some LEDs to the @MBUSA Superdome right now,” tweeted Audi, swiftly plugging its own LED-accented car while taking a dig at its rival Mercedes, sponsor of the New Orleans Superdome. Tide, a detergent, came up with: “We can’t get your #blackout, but we can get your stains out.” But by general consent Oreo won...
Monday, 15 October 2018
Can Marketing Be Saved?
If the digital age has done nothing else for productivity, it has proved spectacularly effective at generating a supply of mantras.
For those of us old enough to remember the inception of the web, it is occasionally worth pausing to remember a few mantras often heard in the mid-90s, and to ask how well they have survived the test of time.
For example, in 1999 Wired's US edition predicted the rise of "infomediaries". I remember that. These seem...