While the current coronavirus pandemic and social upheaval are producing massive change, change is a constant variable. As the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, stated more than two-thousand years ago, “You can never step into the same river twice.” Not only do the waters flow ever-changing, but we, too, change moment to moment. Most often, we are […]
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Uncertainty is like a plague. No one wants to get near it. It is uncomfortable to the point of being terribly disturbing, wrecking-havoc on one’s confidence in decision making. Uncertainty makes planning difficult, if not impossible. It disrupts the ability to move forward or move anywhere at all. The coronavirus is an excellent example of […]
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It’s been an eventful weekend. My eldest daughter and her husband arrived from Chicago to visit. Saturday marked the start of summer 2020. On Sunday, we celebrated Father’s Day. Happy Father’s Day to your Dads and to you, our readers, who are Dads. As the summer has started, we’re taking a break from publishing DISPATCHES […]
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Hi all. I’m not publishing a new Marketing Matters article. Instead, I’m urging you to read Monday’s DISPATCHES’ article, ESTABLISH A BRAND PERFORMANCE DASHBOARD FOR MARKETING SUCCESS, if you haven’t done so already. It’s critically important to making your marketing matter more. It shares an instrument panel to create a dashboard to track brand health […]
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Our target goal is to achieve sales of X, a market share of Y% (whether it be 15, 25, 35%, or more) in Z-time. Beyond receiving our weekly (or daily) sales results and a share report from a custom or syndicated data source, do we know what it takes and if we’re on track to […]
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Welcome to the “new normal,” whatever it means. One thing we might agree upon is that this term, which is appearing in all manner of media, heralds significant change. We can’t ignore it because the new normal has altered our lives. Unlike the changes we typically experience, which evolve slowly, this is, might we say, […]
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My wife and I are in the process of remodeling our new home in Pensacola. It’s a long and arduous process. We—mostly she—has to answer a ton of questions from the builder, landscaper, and assorted subs. It is all very time consuming, stressful, and expensive. Interestingly, my wife is far better equipped to answer these […]
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The data, the data, the data, the data … We need the data. We crave the data. We bow to the data. Why not? The data helps generate hypotheses, make decisions, assess performance, and provide evidence of productivity. However, there is more to the data than the numbers—the stats. There’s context. Then, there’s even more […]
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(Note: An article in last week’s Wall Street Journal noted that, once again, the average tenure of Chief Marketing Officers has declined, continuing a longstanding trend in corporate America. This remains a trend that we have been watching–and occasionally writing about–with no single cause. Though, as both the WSJ article and we have noted, perhaps the most important cause is that […]
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Last week I wrote, “If one doesn’t follow the data, one is accused of being ignorant of science. But from what data is the science drawn? It’s possible that the data is ignorant (drawn improperly), or the manager using it is ignorant.” My musing, “How Good Is Your Data?” tackled the relationship between faulty data and science. […]
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