Category: brands
-
A Rant About Customer-Centricity
Just about every large organisation thinks of itself as customer-centric. Many have this laudable objective as one of their strategic pillars. Yet it never ceases to amaze me that those same organisations seem to want to put as many barriers in the way of great customer service as possible. So here’s my version of what…
-
Google Firestarters 13 – Agencies and Product Innovation
A few years back Murat Mutlu wrote a post that got a lot of conversation going around whether an agency could build the next Instagram or Angry Birds. His post raised some interesting questions around what capabilities modern agencies should have and whether they should be messing around with digital products at all or just…
-
Google Firestarters 10: Planning For Good – The Event
//instagram.com/p/ffsOzAIuC3 Last week saw our tenth Google Firestarters event. I can hardly believe it's been over two years since we had our first event. Since then we've built some pretty significant momentum, had some amazing and thought provoking talks (too many to mention individually) and a real sense of community has built around the events…
-
Marketing For Good
Lots of brands and agencies have initiatives for social good. But what if you could really embed that premise into everything that you do? Last week I spoke at the Google Talent Revolution event in London. Also on the bill was social entrepreneur Sam Conniff, who is the Chairman of youth marketing and engagement agency Livity. Sam…
-
What Is Competitive Advantage?
Terminology like competitive advantage, differentiation and value creation tend to get overused in businesses. This HBR piece on the work of Michael Porter from Joan Margretta who worked with him for almost 20 years succinctly captures how often such terms are misappropriated ("Competitive advantage, for example, is often used to mean 'anything we think we're…
-
Playing The Long Game
As an interesting addendum to the post below I came across this Quora answer from an ex-Amazon employee to the question 'What allows Amazon to be so innovative?'. Alongside mentions of visionary leadership, entrepreneurial culture and future-focused approach, there is of-course talk of the relentless customer focus for which Amazon is famed (and the 'working back…