Empty brands:

What happens when your brand has no social, ethical or environmental foundations? Do brands that are simply economic or perhaps more superficial enjoy long term success? Answer: yes. At least they did.   Focus on real values As marketing, brand building and public relations become more sophisticated there are always opportunities to promote style over content, […]

6 steps to show you know what customers want

Six steps to show you know It’s surprising sometimes just how little or perhaps irregularly we test our assumptions about what we think we know or don’t know about our customers. And, it’s sometimes worthwhile just to step back and apply a few simple tests to see if we’re clear about what we do or […]

Focus marketing on a higher purpose

Is your marketing focused on a higher purpose?  What is a higher purpose? In truth most marketing is focused on relatively short term commercial gain, for example an uplift in advocacy, loyalty or revenue. There is nothing wrong with marketing having clear commercial objectives, short and longer term, even ambitious ones but if these objective […]

Test and learn – cost or asset?

Test and learn is a popular and ‘agile’ approach to development, but does it work at scale?     What is ‘Test and Learn’? Test and Learn is an approach followed by many consumer-focused companies to test ideas in a small number of situations to predict impact. It’s designed to assess impact on Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) […]

What is customer value?

We know what it means Intuitively most of know what customer value means to us, but as businesses and organisations how often do we step back and think what does customer value mean to our customers? Perhaps more importantly how often do we think about how to deliver it consistently well and at scale?   […]