Category Archives: Management
Creating a Culture of Trust
A girlfriend of mine has recently been assigned to a cross department project at work. The assignment is a great opportunity for her. She’ll be involved in the decision making process of long range organizational planning, and she’s getting exposure to leaders she typically doesn’t access. Needless to say, the majority of the time, the assignment makes her want to tear her hair out. The fundamental issue she faces is being unable to collaborate with the other people assigned to the project. Is it because they work in different departments? Is it because they work on different floors? Is it because the[.....]
Can you really create an internal brand culture in your organization?
“Everybody needs to own this, from the CFO to the mail clerk; we have invested too much for this to go wrong.” This is the kind of statement that strikes fear in the hearts of CMOs and marketing directors if you have ever worked to jumpstart or revitalize a brand for your company. When my CEO made a similar statement to me, I asked myself, how in the heck do I motivate engineers and scientists to own our brand? Why is it so important anyway? “Employees have the power to either reinforce or break a brand’s promise every time they[.....]
Is Your Brand Training to Win or Just Happy to Compete?
Why is it that a lot of brands seem to lack the drive to compete? Marketing departments that are run by people who will kill you at racquetball, trounce you in a 5K or dunk over you in a game of basketball become shrinking violets when faced with a rival brand. Marketing decisions that should literally take minutes, instead take months, bogged down in research and discombobulated decision-making. The “run-it-up-the-flagpole” culture that exists in America today has created a sort of corporate genetic mutation. Brands that should be lithe and agile, instead have mutated into weak-muscled, milquetoasts and are in[.....]
Is Design Thinking Really Dead?
Impatient companies trying to incorporate design thinking into their organizations have become frustrated with the whole process and like children who’ve played with a toy so much they’ve worn down the batteries, they’re pouting and saying, “It doesn’t work.” Here’s the issue, people who don’t fully understand design thinking have made it a “codified process,” effectively pulling the wings off of it. The people I’m speaking of are the corporations looking to capture some of the magic of design thinking. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be able to do anything without making it a Stage-gate process, attempting to apply straight-line[.....]
What Charles Woodson Can Teach Business Executives about Effective Communication
We did a little work for the Green Bay Packers a few years ago when they launched the opening of their new stadium and beautiful atrium, so you can guess folks here at LSB were a little more than excited by the Super Bowl win. Hey, everyone from Wisconsin is riding a high right now, but something our PR folks noticed in the run-up and completion of the Super Bowl is that the Packers’ veteran cornerback Charles Woodson became a pretty effective spokesperson for his team. When we looked a little closer, we thought there might be some great tips[.....]
The First and Last Best Practice for Business Success in 2011
If the entire Marketplace section of the January 4th Wall Street Journal is an indication of what’s in store for businesses for 2011, then investors might be in for a disappointing year. Brand name after brand reports it is stalled: Motorola, Borders, Chrysler, MySpace, Nokia, Yahoo, J&J, Kodak. Yet the turnaround strategies execs are cite are, I believe, destined to produce disappointing results: more and new gizmos, faster technology, finer segmentation of markets, cash infusions, leaner operations. What they’re missing is the first and foremost best practice of business success, having a meaningful role to play in the lives of[.....]
Be a Chief Conversation Officer
Brandworks Bits One of the amazing things about working at LSB is the opportunity each year to attend Brandworks University and learn from some of the best minds in marketing. The 2009 conference in June of this year was no exception. The conference focused on jumpstarting sales and ROI in the Conversation Economy. While there is no replacement for being at the conference itself, we will endeavor to share some of the learnings with you via this blog over the next few weeks as we do our best to summarize the remarks of the faculty. In addition, a detailed whitepaper[.....]
Evolving from CMO to CDO
A survey of CMOs from top brands (recently conducted by the American Association of Advertising Agencies) finds them compelled to completely transform themselves into Chief Digital Officers. This is to be expected. With digitization, marketing’s 4P’s have converged just as culture, commerce and communications have converged. To survive, every brand must become a media platform and all brands are in the business of e-commerce – either to sell or gather data comparable to what their competitors have. This reality is making CMOs very nervous. Most don’t feel expert enough to leverage digitization to drive or measure results at a time they desperately[.....]