MARKETING COMMUNICATION DIGEST

​ Throughout my professional career, I've always been working for either a Startup or an incubation business within a public company. When I hire someone, or sometimes when I am being interviewed as a candidate, this is one of most frequently asked questions: "How would you describe yourself in three words?" It sounds like a simple question but it can reveal a lot about who you really are, and whether you would be a good fit for the job. Here are my answers: 1.  Optimistic Startups and new business will inevitably face challenges and should always expect the unexpected.  When I interview someone for a job or mentor someone in my team, I look for the signs to make sure that this person is optimistic about what we are doing in the long run, not just being enthusiastic about the next project or the next salary. Being optimistic is not a nice-to-have, but a must-have: Products could fail, markets could change, customers could come and go, and fundi...

The IBB approach to marketing success for entrepreneurs- Well, it happened again. I was approached recently by an entrepreneur who had tried to segment the market top-down to prepare a Marketing Plan and found it delivered groups of customers who were defined too generally and were too numerous. The numbers were way beyond his resources to reach, and supply and the requirements were so general so as to make the product-service fit to the customer impossible to implement. The drilling down process was killing him and he was suffering a classic case of paralysis by analysis. I suggested to him that a better approach was the entrepreneurial approach because this is what many entrepreneurs do naturally; identify, build, and broaden (IBB). It is a bottom-up process unlike segmentation which is top-down. The approach involves identifying the perfect customer, easy to change, accessible, and fundable with an economic number of similar cohorts. (For many entrepreneurs, this is...

Every advertising person has stories about how their agencies have blown new business pitches, often because someone said or did something stupid.  There is a classic story about an agency which pitched a car account but not one person showed up at the client’s office driving the client’s brand. There is another story of an agency pitching a watch account, but the Agency President showed up wearing a Rolex. I had to start drinking Stout though, first as Octagon Marathon Account Director for the Legend Extra Stout brand in 2001, and further as Chief Executive of a Guinness Nigeria-Retained Agency, R&B, in 2005. I would love to collect your stories if you can top the one that follows. I know quite a lot of them can be very funny, even in the telling.  When new business prospects come to visit a prospective agency, they can always sense and feel whether there is good chemistry among the agency participants. In many cases, even agency principals who do not ...

In his famous book The 4 Minute Work Week , author Tim Ferris introduces readers to Pareto’s law, also known as the 80/20 rule. The idea is that you can vastly improve your quality of life by focusing your energy on the 20% of activities that produce 80% of your desired outcomes. Conversely, says Ferris, you need to identify and eliminate the 20% of activities that take up 80% of your time. The goal is always to find and eliminate inefficiencies in order to give yourself more time to spend on high value activities. Let’s apply this to the office for a second. How often do you leave at the end of the day with an underwhelming sense of achievement because it took too long to find what you were looking for? The frustration of having wasted time trying to find information is one I’m sure you can relate to. If not, just ask someone in the Sales or Marketing team. I’m guessing you’ll find that people in Marketing spend a fair amount of time and energy creating brochures, data sh...

In a recent article, Sarwant Singh forecasts a year of "smarter" everything; AI, IoT, money, media, automobiles, phones and even robots. This is to be expected; after all, isn't this what the last decade was leading up to? Smarter is better. There is no dispute about that. Smartcar These days, the definition of smart continues to evolve. This is exciting for consumers. As employees or employers however, these changes are invigorating. We can live and work smarter, faster, more intelligently, and more easily. Smartphones Has this unending emergence of consumer-based-intelligence and information-based-automation, caused us to overlook one critical evolution that has been quietly brewing in the background? The convergence of Marketing and HR has happened!. And here is why it matters, and what we need to know about it. In 2017 we acknowledge that the battle for brand and share-of-wallet has moved No longer does it sit inside brick and mortar store...

Larry Page, CEO of Alphabet (the company formerly known as Google), has a quirky way of deciding which companies he likes. It’s called “The Toothbrush Test.” When Page looks at a potential company to acquire, says the New York Times, he wants to know if the product is, like a toothbrush, “something you will use once or twice a day.” Page clearly understands habits. But what if your product doesn’t pass his Toothbrush Test ? Perhaps you’d like people to use your product or service frequently, but it just doesn’t make sense to do so. Nir Eyal was hired to present at a gathering of 700 real estate agents, some months ago; and the MC made a gracious introduction, saying, “Now we’ll hear from Nir Eyal, an expert on Consumer Habits. Nir is going to teach us how to make home buying and selling into a habit!” Opening, Nir had said: “I’m sorry, there must have been some misunderstanding. There is no way I am going to teach you how to make home buying and selling into ...

Everybody's working for the weekend, but how you spend your two days off may say something about how successful you are. What you get up to doesn't really matter, per se. If you prefer lounging around the house to spontaneous adventures, that's great! You probably need that time to wind down. When it comes to weekends, the main thing that separates ‘successful people’ from ‘unsuccessful people’ is   mindfulness . Are you planning ahead and truly thinking about how to spend your free time this weekend? This is why I’m publishing this piece on a Thursday to help you consider ahead how to spend those two free days, Saturday and Sunday. Here are 11 things that   unsuccessful   people tend not to do over the weekend - and why to do them: Not every minute of every hour of your weekend needs to be planned out, but it's good to have a general idea of what you'd like to do or get done. That will allow you protect your time, and maybe even schedule in ...