Making Something Different

I’m watching a repeat of the season premiere of Project Runway (yes, I am a fan). The challenge for the first week was to take grocery items and repurpose them into something fashionable. Many succeeded, while a few fell flat on their faces.

The most common error was taking an existing fabric—like a tablecloth [...]

Execution Matters

I was speaking recently with my CEO, and the conversation took a rather predictable turn. For the last several years, I have held firm to the belief that ideas, in and of themselves hold no value. The real value of an idea lies within your ability and willingness to execute.

And how you execute [...]

High Switching Costs

I’ve never really gotten into, nor understood for that matter, the ongoing fight between PC and Mac users. Each has its own features, benefits and drawbacks and caters to two distinct audiences. Neither one is truly better than the other. As things progress, each one is nudging closer to the other, blurring [...]

Should GE Sell or Partner Appliance Unit?

GE announced last week that it is considering selling, spinning off or partnering its appliance unit. My first thought went to why they would want to dump it at all. GE has a long history of dumping underperformers (units and people). In December they put their finance unit (or at least some [...]

Balancing Consistency with Innovation and Creativity

When you have a brand, the one thing customers look for is consistency. Even if it’s bad, the fact that it is consistent gives them comfort. Yet, too much consistency can feel like a rut. It can bring on a mean case of boredom.

You work with it day in and day out, [...]

Another Kind of Relativity

I’m talking here in terms of “everything’s relative” and individual circumstances, not something as absolute as Einstein’s theory. In fact, I am advocating against most absolutes:

Recipes for success

Quick fixes

X number of things to do when…

Benchmarking against rigid percentage increases (sales, profits, volume) or decreases (costs, waste, weight)

Stepwise programs

Best practices

This does not mean that I [...]

Jumping Someone Else’s Train

Not only do we like our lines, we enjoy hopping on bandwagons as well (with a tip of the hat to The Cure for the title). The explosion of “green” everything is the simplest example. But there are several others such as mini PCs, widget/gadget design templates, content management companies, weight loss formulas [...]

The Choices We Make

I know that I am exactly where I am because of certain choices I have made. Some of those I can trace back nearly 20 years. Certainly others’ choices have factored into it. But how I chose to respond, behave and act put me on one path or another.

The same is true [...]

Both Sides of Your Noggin

True success in brand management requires you to use both sides of your brain, often moving imperceptively from hard number analysis to creative conceptualization and everywhere in between. That’s because you must understand every aspect of your business, how all the pieces fit together and function as a whole.

It takes recognizing which investments will [...]

Wanting and Wanting to Buy

Last Thursday, a story came on NPR’s All Things Considered titled “From Clunker to Cruiser, Ford Posts Quarterly Profit”. One of the interviewees stated that people didn’t want new cars right now. I quickly turned to my wife and said, “That’s not true. People want new cars, they just don’t want to [...]