Category: Marketing

The Most Popular Articles

These are the most popular blog posts on this site. 1.  The Top Ten Lateral Thinking Puzzles 2. Who are a company’s most important Stakeholders? 3.  What is the Difference between Creativity and Innovation? 4.  The Seven Best Ways to Become Rich 5.  How Startrek inspired an Innovation – your Cellphone 6.  How to Use Six Serving Men for Problem Analysis 7. How to use Force Field Analysis... Read More--

How to Name a New Product

Companies and products are like people. They have names, personalities and images. Our individual names are chosen for us by our parents. But if we start a company or launch a new product then we get to choose a name. This is not a trivial task. It is worthy of some time and effort. I recently ran a brainstorm workshop for a client with the aim of finding a name for a new product. We took this approach... Read More--

What One Word Encapsulates your Brand?

In the classic marketing book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, authors Al Ries and Laura Ries state that a successful branding program is based on the concept of a singularity. It creates in the mind of the prospect the perception that there is no product on the market quite like yours. Furthermore they argue that you should strive to own one word in the mind of the consumer – a word that... Read More--

Topical Mischief makes for Innovative Marketing

The news that unauthorised horse meat had been found in various parts of the European meat trade in early 2013 caused a major scandal. Consumers and regulators were up in arms. Paddy Power, the Irish online gambling company, seized the moment by issuing a 36 page cookbook of horse meat recipes with their annual results. It gained them significant publicity.  In an article in Marketing Week, Ken Robertson,... Read More--

Ask, ‘What Business are we in?’

The CEO of Black and Decker once said, “People don’t go into a DIY store because they need one of our drills. They go because they need a hole in the wall.”  Wonderbra in their internal communications to staff say this, “We do not sell underwear. We do not sell lingerie. What we sell is self-confidence for women.”  Harley Davidson does not sell motorbikes. It sells the concept... Read More--

Turn your Marketing Weakness into a Strength

One way to innovate with your products and services is to examine your perceived weaknesses and turn them into strengths.  James Bannerman gives some examples in his new book, Genius – deceptively simple ways to become instantly smarter.   A pint of  Guinness takes longer to pour than other beers and this might be seen as a weakness but Guinness advertising focuses on this slow pouring and... Read More--

Ways to Innovate your Product or Service – Add, Subtract, Differentiate.

  If you are looking for product or process innovations then try some mathematical operators – add, subtract and differentiate. What can you add to your product, what can you take away and how can you differentiate? Let’s look at how Ryanair used this approach to take on the established airlines. Michael O’Leary, the founder of Ryanair looked at the whole business process of... Read More--

When the conventional no longer works, try the controversial

The New South Wales Road Traffic Authority ran a highly controversial and highly successful campaign against speeding. Previous campaigns featuring accidents and dangers of speeding had had little effect. The new campaign showed women shaking their little finger – a gesture used to symbolise a small penis – as speeding male motorists race past. The gesture caught on and this edgy campaign... Read More--

Is there a completely different way to deliver what you deliver?

Michael Dell Is there a completely different way to operate in your business? If all your competitors are using a broadly similar approach, is there an entirely separate approach that could deliver what your customers want? In the early 1980s the leading manufacturers of Personal Computers were companies such as IBM, Compaq, Toshiba, Hewlett Packard and Olivetti. They operated a similar model. They... Read More--