Are we selling services, products or both? The short-answer is ‘Yes’ – but what we’re really selling, every time, is a promise… The start-point for this was one of those ideas that arise first-thing-in-the-morning, seemingly without any warning: Idea: In sales, …

Service, product, service – promise and product Read more »

For digital-transformation, what’s the difference between ‘push’ and ‘pull’? And where and how does enterprise-story come into the picture? At first, these questions might seem more about marketing and suchlike than about ‘digital’ as such – yet the reality is …

Push or pull? – two views of enterprise Read more »

If we’re trying to make sense of systems, our greatest enemy is fragmentation. Or, to be more precise, the type of fragmentation that arises from misuse of analysis. Specialise, says analysis. Specialise again! And specialise the specialisms! Hyperspecialise! Cut it …

Against fragmentation Read more »

Marketing departments of so many organisations these days seem obsessed about their Net Promoter Score – the percentage of customers who’ll promote their products to others. “Free advertising!” is how some have described it to me – hence very enticing to …

Gross Demoter Score Read more »

How much does it cost to acquire a customer? To retain a customer? To lose a customer? And in what sense of ‘cost’? In part this one was triggered by reading through my relatively-new copy of Business Model You, and …

Costs of acquisition, retention, de-acquisition Read more »

‘Value-proposition’ is a term much-bandied-about in business-models and the like. Yet what exactly is it? A tweet by Alex Osterwalder pointed me to an article by Steve Blank on ‘How to build a billion-dollar startup‘, which included this brief section on the role of …

What is a value-proposition? Read more »

As the economy shifts ever onward from manufacturing toward services, how do marketing and market-relationships need to change with this shift? And what enterprise-architectures do we need to support this? [In part this is a follow-on from Dave Gray‘s excellent …

Marketing and the service-oriented enterprise Read more »

Rethinking the enterprise from a customer-centric perspective was another theme that came up in that conversation with Robert Phipps last week, in this case with a bit of virtual help from Chris Potts. The ‘conventional’ way of viewing an enterprise …

Where marketing meets enterprise-architecture Read more »

Every enterprise has a story, of course – many of them, in fact. Yet there’s also a deeper story that defines the enterprise itself, what the enterprise is. It’s not just that the enterprise has a story: the enterprise is a …

The enterprise is the story Read more »