Marketing Strategy

Chief marketing officers, who have among the shortest tenures in the C-suite, are used to pressure. But now their very existence is coming under threat. Several big-name companies have recently done away with the CMO position altogether—including Johnson & Johnson, Uber, Lyft, Beam Suntory, Taco Bell and Hyatt Hotels, accelerating…

Patagonia, the company that urges people not to buy its jackets ―  and instead just fix the ones they already have ― is applying that message on a broad new level. The environmentally conscious outdoor retailer has pumped the brakes on its popular corporate branding program and will no longer produce co-branded…

Many strategy execution processes fail because the firm does not have something worth executing. The strategy consultants come in, do their work, and document the new strategy in a PowerPoint presentation and a weighty report. Town hall meetings are organized, employees are told to change their behavior, balanced scorecards are reformulated, and…

Marketers and advertisers are more biased and less empathetic than they like to believe, according to a provocative new research paper out of the U.K. This is creating a “substantial barrier” to connecting with audiences outside major cultural hubs like London and New York (or, presumably, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver).…

Reach’s new study, The Empathy Delusion, is serious, sober and thought-provoking – but paints a view of adland that does not accord with Dominic Mills’ experience. Plus: the screen/time debate and a suggestion for Mary Meeker Imagine you are ready to do your weekly supermarket shop. On one side of…

Early in my career as a product leader, I learned to execute quickly, leading to success in building games and children’s software. But two things reinforced the value of strategic thinking for me. One good, another bad: The Good. I learned to accelerate progress by thinking strategically. In building children’s software,…

Amazon has become the world’s most valuable brand this year by overtaking Google and Apple, according to a report. Last year, Google was ranked the top, followed by Apple and Amazon. The 2019 BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking, released by WPP and Kantar put amazon on top.…

Back in 2007 the five major mobile-phone manufacturers—Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and LG—collectively controlled 90% of the industry’s global profits. That year, Apple’s iPhone burst onto the scene and began gobbling up market share. By 2015 the iPhone singlehandedly generated 92% of global profits, while all but one of the former…

One of the challenges that customer experience (CX) professionals face is getting the insights they uncover through Voice of Customer (VoC) programs to drive changes to the business. Part of that challenge stems from the fact that just because customer insights are being served up via increasingly customizable reports and…

For many years I’ve been preaching that customer service is the new marketing. Give your customers something positive to talk about and they will tell their story to their friends, colleagues and family members. That’s marketing – specifically known as Word-of-Mouth (WOM) marketing. It is driven by the interactions your…