Never teach a pig to sing

“Never teach a pig to sing.  It wastes your time and it annoys the pig.” – Robert Heinlein Innovation is hard-work.  So is becoming truly customer-centric. Those who want to desperately maintain the status quo rarely appreciate the champion of change.   Those who wish to stay slavishly product or channel-centric often dread hearing someone [...]

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Surgical Shopping and the Hangover Market

Last holiday season I coined the term “surgical shopping” to describe the highly precise way many consumers were purchasing.  While the panic of late 2008 and early 2009 subsided, consumers were only gradually opening their wallets, focusing primarily on needs vs. wants and often trading down to brands that gave very clear bang for the [...]

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Expensive & Lousy Meets Free & Excellent

I just got back from Chicago where I spoke at the annual Shopper Insights in Action conference.  It was a great trip, but one of the things I will remember the most is a very disappointing experience I had at the host hotel. At this hotel (which shall go nameless, but it rhymes with lariat), [...]

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What Color is Your Growth Strategy? The Curse of the Red Herring.

Blue Ocean. Black Swan. Purple Cow. In the last several years various authors and pundits have literally given us colorful ways to think about how to grow our businesses.   Good stuff. But what about the Red Herring? As you probably know, a “red herring” is any diversion that is intended to take attention away from [...]

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Defying the Sea of Sameness

Any business school course on strategy will devote significant time to the importance of competitive differentiation.  We attend marketing conferences where speakers pontificate on the need to have a unique value proposition.  Excellent books like Seth Godin’s Purple Cow preach the benefits of being remarkable to separate yourself from the herd. Yet any visit to [...]

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