Do you understand all the competition in your market? One area which marketers need to understand in order to produce great, relevant, strategies is the competition they face, not just from their direct competitors, but also those in the wider market who offer a similar solution for customers. I’ve just (very belatedly) listened to a […]
The Warburtons Growth Story – how a focus on quality built a brand to rival Coca-Cola From Bolton to using Hollywood superstars – fascinating insights into the growth of Warburtons to be the second largest grocery brand in the UK from Mark Simester, Marketing Director of Warburtons. The start point was something I didn’t realise […]
Strategic Collaborative Advantage This was a great talk (best of the day for me) from Paul Skinner of Agency of the Future and Pimp my Cause, full of fantastic tips for any business and also those studying CIM qualifications, particularly the Driving Innovation module of the Diploma in Professional Marketing. Starting with the question about […]
Yesterday evening I attended the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) FutureFocus event in Leeds as part of their #Marketing2025 Hackathon launch. During the evening there were many interesting discussions about the role of marketing and what this might be in 10 years time. One theme which kept recurring was the actual role of marketing. One […]
There is a great podcast in the BBC Radio 4 ‘The Bottom Line’ which includes great examples of a few regularly used marketing models – the podcast, entitled Single Product Companies was braodcast on 26 Jun 14 and featured interviews with senior staff from WD40, Maclaren and Crocs. Each of these organisations has a very limited […]
One area I often discuss when teaching the CIM Chartered Postgraduate Diploma, especially the Emerging Themes unit, is collaboration between competing organisations to develop products. The reason for doing this is to save costs on areas where differentiation is not important and no advantage will be gained by any party involved but cost saving can […]
The BBC Trust have published a proposed strategy for the future of the BBC based on a challenge to address questions about the scope of the BBC’s activities to focus on how the BBC can most effectively deliver its public service mission and meet audience needs and deliver value for money. This is a situation […]
Interesting to see that Proctor and Gamble must have been considering their business portfolio, they are selling their pharmaceutical business to the Irish drugmaker Warner Chilcott – see story here This is a classic example of an organisation considering the future, presumably based on the factors typically included in the various portfolio matrices which are […]
Interesting to read an article from The Sunday Times – link here – about Google and Sony joining forces to offer the book library created by Google available for the Sony e-reader. As a strategic move this could be very significant; the critical mass which both Sony and Google should gain from this will give […]
