In 1999, Adam Morgan published Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders, a manifesto on winning in the face of superior competition. Big Fish was about taking on the market leader despite limited resources; it was about making your own rules; it was about redefining the terms by which a product category should be judged.
Big Fish offered an alternative path to the top. In every market, Morgan argued, the leader was already entrenched, his inertia impossible to overcome by brute force, and his war chest overflowing with resources. The only path to market share, Morgan warned, was to win the battle for mindshare, and the context of that conflict would be defined in terms of thought leadership – with ideas that truly added value.
Morgan outlined eight “credos” of Challenger Brands. And though he illustrated his work with examples of many companies in many markets, the book was, more than any other, the story of one man – Steve Jobs. Read more
Faster than the Speed of Light
Well, this changes everything. The BBC reported, this week, that Scientists have successfully repeated an experiment in which neutrinos have been recorded traveling faster than the speed of light. The full scientific report, submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, is currently being reviewed by the scientific community.
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A Business Marketer’s Guide to Profits (or, “How to Satisfy your CEO”)
A few years back, a young Marketing VP confided, “My first year on the job, I lowered our production costs, reduced our dependence on outside services, improved our mail and email response rates, and turned around a departmental morale problem, only to be chided by the CEO, at my year-end review…”
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Cover Yourself in KEVLAR
This blog entry is dedicated to Nancy James, who specifically asked us to write a short post, for a change…
I had the good fortune to speak at the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations in Baltimore, this week, and between sessions, one attendee asked if there was a winning formula for writing acceptance speeches for leaders who have just taken over departments or companies. When I got back to the office, I spent several hours searching, and finding none, devised the following:
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The Role of Culture in Brand
If we have a mantra at MarketPoint, it’s this: In order for a brand to succeed, it has to be authentic, transaction-worthy and sustainable. By “authentic,” we mean the brand must be consistent with the values, the purpose, and actions of the organization. “Transaction-worthy,” of course, implies that the brand must offer genuine value in context of the market’s needs and desires. And “sustainability” requires that the organization is committed to delivering on the brand promise at every touch-point in the customer experience.
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Eating the Big Fish
Often, in our work with organizational leaders, executives will reference seminal works by prominent business authors. Some titles seem to pop up routinely, others less so. One title we hear surprisingly seldom is Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders (Adam Morgan, 1999). Yet, to us, the concepts Morgan develops in Eating the Big Fish are every bit as critical to success as those of Trout and Reis, or Rosser Reeves, or Kim and Mauborgne, or Malcolm Gladwell, or Jim Collins, or Seth Godin. And so, we’ve decided to offer a brief overview, here… Read more
One Last Bite at the Apple
In 1999, Adam Morgan published Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders, a manifesto on winning in the face of superior competition. Big Fish was about taking on the market leader despite limited resources; it was about making your own rules; it was about redefining the terms by which a product category should be judged.
Big Fish offered an alternative path to the top. In every market, Morgan argued, the leader was already entrenched, his inertia impossible to overcome by brute force, and his war chest overflowing with resources. The only path to market share, Morgan warned, was to win the battle for mindshare, and the context of that conflict would be defined in terms of thought leadership – with ideas that truly added value.
Morgan outlined eight “credos” of Challenger Brands. And though he illustrated his work with examples of many companies in many markets, the book was, more than any other, the story of one man – Steve Jobs. Read more
Five Tips for Creating Meaningful Infographics – Confessions of an Addict
If you’re reading this article on SocialMediaToday, you probably know far more about the mechanics of creating infographics than I. If you’re reading it on my blog, maybe not. Either way, these tips from an infographics addict could go some distance toward improving the social media landscape. So, without further ado, here are five, by-no-means-exhaustive tips…
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Why You Should Read Seth Godin’s Latest Book (We Are All Weird)
I don’t mind admitting it – I’m a big fan of Seth Godin. So, when he announced his new book We Are All Weird in his September 21 blog post, I immediately bought the hardcover. Read more
Ending the War over Social Media Marketing Governance
What follows (all in the space of 500 words) are three interesting stories. The first two are closely interwoven; the third seems unrelated. Together, they span thousands of years. And while each is fascinating in its own right, when seen as one, they provide a solution to the war of governance over social media marketing.
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Social Media for Business is about Giving, not Taking
Many organizations – and particularly businesses – still look at social media and wonder, “Where’s the value?” From their perspective, social media fails to deliver the goods. And the bad news is, from their perspective, it probably always will – because the question “What can I get out of social media?” misses the very point of social media.
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