I don’t know about you but I love it when someone challenges my thinking, inspires me to greater heights and makes me do better work. In today’s busy world, it might not happen very often but I think you have to make it happen. You...
The days of hyper-aggressive competition between brands are being mollified as progressive businesses put aside competitive inclinations in favour of collaboration. Sure, healthy competition can drive people and businesses to innovate and improve. But aggressive competition, the type that blindingly seeks to destroy the enemy and...
Hopefully you took the time to read this image carefully? I would read it again now anyway. This hairdresser is a ‘specialist’. It specialises in short hair, it specialises in long hair, it specialises in beard trims AND (wait for it), it also styles hair! You might think...
Local Area Marketing Manager was for decades the “Traffic Cop” of marketing careers; you either started there or got sent there because you couldn’t handle proper marketing. Well, guess what? The language and tenets of local area marketing are remarkably similar to those recently espoused by...
In last week's post, ‘How to get some agency love back’, we highlighted the importance of honesty in regards to removing the systemic deception and underhand money-making practices pervading the agency landscape. Having a frank, open and respectful dialogue between client and agency will go...
Certainty. We all crave it and, in some cases, demand it from our colleagues, partners and suppliers. But of course, there is no such thing as certainty. As William Goldman said of the entertainment industry in 1983, “nobody knows anything”. Which is perhaps more true...
What we measure is what counts. A universally acknowledged truth is that people adapt their behaviour based on how they perceive they will be measured/compared/judged. For those of us in the marketing and communication fields, what we measure has largely defined the industry we now...
For decades it was all about new inventions. "What will they think of next?" people used to cry. We were amazed, intrigued and expectant with the wave of new inventions presented to us. The rocket ship, the personal computer, the mobile phone and the electric...
In the olden days, an ambitious farmer, who owned no land, paid a local landowner to grow crops on his land in return for rent. A few years passed and the farmer was quite content, he always had enough food for his family and had...
Nowadays, innovative thinking rarely comes from the lightbulb moment in the bath. In today’s over-commoditised world, innovation is less about invention and more about finding a better way to do something than it was done before. For years brainstorm facilitators have used techniques to encourage participants...
