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Recent Posts Tagged With 'Strategy'
Everybody in the Pool (or Snow Drift) for the Brand Promise
Trends are pushing brands into innovative channels to sell their products and services. These strategies include going through intermediaries who resell, repackage, aggregate, or creates marketplaces for multiple providers' offerings. These arrangeme...
Stop Right There, Before We Go Any Further
Okay, it’s the time for 2009 reviews and 2010 look aheads.So, what did you stop doing in 2009? Stopping something counts as “doing something.” And in a period when time demands are coming at us from more ways than ever, it’s okay to quit thin...
The Eighth Day of Life-Changing Gifts - Protecting People from Themselves
When Cyndi signed me up to work out with a trainer in 2006, the first meeting included a diet inventory. This entailed listing everything typically eaten throughout the day along with other food and cooking preferences.As the trainer reviewed the res...
The Fifth Day of Life-Changing Gifts - Creating Ridiculous Growth Opportunities
At a company-first sales conference, we'd scheduled Tommy Lasorda as a surprise second-day speaker. My boss (a very different boss than in yesterday's post) was set to emcee the whole conference, yet at the end of day one, he said, “I have to spend...
The Third Day of Life-Changing Gifts - Giving the Okay to Challenge Thinking
Early in his tenure, our CEO shared his ten business principles. I don’t remember nine of them, but one stood out for of its simplicity, matter-of-factness, and wide applicability: “Don’t do anything stupid.”I've used this admonition numerous...
The Second Day of Life-Changing Gifts - Focusing on What\'s Really Important
A friend from church gave me a tape several years ago by Fr. Larry Richards, a Catholic priest and evangelist, who does a broad series of talks on faith topics. In one about our "life’s purpose," he discussed the need for a spirit of sacrifice. In ...
12 Steps to Grow Diversity in Your Personal Network
Look at your network now compared to last year. Have you dramatically expanded the number of people you can call or email and be reasonably sure you'll get a response from them?And that doesn't mean from loading up on contacts inside your company usi...
Out and About Marketing - Double the Fun, If You Follow the Rules!
The Baskin Robbins Double Header Cone screams, "I came out of an innovation session!"That's okay though because it appears from the outside-looking-in to have a solid customer experience-based strategic foundation.An ice cream cone allowing multiple ...
Out and About Marketing - Making Buying Decisions Simpler
Product innovation is rampant. Great for providing choices! Crappy for having to choose from among them. So it's smart product strategy for brands to remove uncertainty and apprehension by making decisions simpler for consumers. Interestingly, today'...
How a Category-Creating Jersey Deal Set the Stage for an Industry-Centric MLS Cup - Guest Post by John Digles
I met John Digles in June 2009 as he produced video interviews for the Business Marketing Association Conference. John's background is fascinating; he's an award-winning film maker whose work has gained critical notice, including at the Sundance Film...
Getting Ready for 2010: Planning in a Recession - Guest Post by Barrett Sydnor
Today's guest post addressing preparing for 2010 comes from Barrett Sydnor, one of the first guest authors ever on Brainzooming back in early 2008. I've worked with Barrett on various strategic planning projects over the past 15 years, including quit...
Getting Ready for 2010: 3 Real Life Planning Successes
I'm a proponent of spreading strategic thinking broadly in a company and not readily handing off strategy development to outside parties exclusively. Yet I've been a part of many examples where an outside perspective helped move strategy development ...
Getting Ready for 2010: What Have You Been Saying?
A loyal reader pointed out recently that Brainzooming has become too unwieldy, making it tough to go back and find specific posts. One possibility is using the search function on each page to search for particular topics directly in Brainzooming arti...
More from the Frost & Sullivan Marketing World 2009 Event
Today's recap from the Frost & Sullivan Marketing World 2009 event, highlights presentations from two CMOs - Eduardo Conrado at Motorola (Broadband Mobility Solutions) and Chris X. Moloney at Scottrade.Eduardo spoke on "CEO Expectations: How Mark...
The Frost & Sullivan Marketing World Event - Joe Batista
I participated in the Frost & Sullivan Marketing World 2009 event November 2 in Chicago, leading a round table on getting around innovation roadblocks. The next several days will highlight some of the many intriguing ideas shared during the day f...
What Are We Trying to Say?
Many (okay, let's be real, nearly all) corporate visions, missions, values, BHAGs (you name it), sound alike. They either extol bland concepts (i.e., "our associates will be the best") or meaningless ideas (i.e., "our human intellectual capital will ...
When DIY Doesn\'t Work
Steve Epley visited last week, and we talked about challenges in trying to do for yourself what you do professionally for others. This resonated because of recent work on the Brainzooming™ brand. It's much easier to figure out another's great brand...
Innovation Strategy? Yes, No, and Everything In Between - Guest Post by Mike Brown
How can I be a guest blogger on my own blog you may ask? Well, this post was originally written for Braden Kelley's Blogging Innovation website. So it was a original guest post there in response to the question, "Does an organization have to have an ...
How Many Years Experience Do You Have?
Several years ago, an HR professional passed along a piece of wisdom warranting consideration by anyone who works: Lots of people claim twenty years experience, when what they really have is one year of experience, twenty times over.Since that conver...
Make Mistakes Week
Amid dramatic changes in my professional life, and Brainzooming™ in particular, I'm deliberately forcing myself into uncomfortable areas necessitating rapid development of previously underused skills.Understanding the importance of diving in and no...
Borrowing Brilliance - A Guest Post of Sorts
I attended the KC Small Business "Think Bigger" luncheon recently when guest speaker David Kord Murray discussed his new book, "Borrowing Brilliance." The tome covers 6 steps (defining, borrowing, combining, incubating, judging, and enhancing) to bui...
Creating Memorable Experiences
We wrapped up the AMA Marketing Research Conference last week to very kind words from a number of participants about the different nature of the conference experience.The secret of great, meaningful brand events lies in a simple formula. Look for the...
Taking Note in a New Way
Want to meet cool new people? Next time you're at a public presentation, "live tweet" it. Live tweeting implies using Twitter to report:What the speaker is communicatingOffering your own commentaryRetweeting what others are tweeting about itI live tw...
Marketing Research RIP 2029: Why marketing research will not exist by 2029 (or by 2019 for that matter) - Guest Post by Ted Morris
Note: A mid-September tweet from #Researchlive asked for short posts about what the market research industry will look like in 2029. A retweet by @amamrc prompted Ted Morris to comment that by 2029, market research will be a dead industry. Amid a con...
The Best Laid Plans Result from Creative Thinking - Guest Post by Sage Bray
I first connected with Sage Bray when she was nice enough to do a tweet pointing her Twitter followers to Brainzooming as a great blog for creative inspiration. Her Twitter name (@aSageInRealLife) and profile were both tremendously intriguing. Sage i...
Twitter Hashtag Days - #StrategyLesson
Hashtags function as keywords on Twitter, making tweets more easily searched and grouped by topic. I've been using various ones lately, and blog pieces the next few days will expand on a few hashtag themes beyond Twitter's 140 character limit.Today's...
Upcycling: The Greener Path - Guest Post by Nancy Martini
We've spent time on Brainzooming talking about recycling ideas, yet haven't touched on recycling physical materials. That changes with today's guest post from Nancy Martini. She's an Art Director and EcoArtist (as she's known on Twitter), working wit...
What Will It Take to Cover Me?
The past few weeks, I've been schlepping around fabric stores since Cyndi wants to recover several pieces of furniture. This is unfamiliar territory for me, which usually means an opportunity to hunt for different takes on Brainzooming-related ideas....
Musical Chairs
Not sure where I learned this originally, but it's a great, simple tactic for meetings where you're voicing a position contrary to someone else's: never sit across from them. Try sitting next to, or at least on the same side of the table as, whoever ...
Lessons from Kansas City Infobank - Negotiating Deadlines
Unreasonable time expectations or well-intentioned but unachievable deadlines are a fact of business life. As a two-person operation at Kansas City Infobank, we constantly battled the swings between trying to sell projects and then having too many to...
