MV newsletter - March 2006

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If you want to get really up close and personal with the competition, there is one truly radical solution. Become your own most aggressive competitor .

This is not easy to achieve, not least because your organisation will tend to favour one of your brands over another. Brand A will have greater profit margins, a better fit to your corporate culture, and strong internal commitment. However Brand B may have a far greater reach, faster sales cycle times, and a freshness that Brand A lacks.

Why place all your bets in one pot?

So, make it easier for yourself. Create a new organisation devoted to beating the shit out of your core brand. You may find that you are the only two players left standing.

Spilling the beans

In line with our unswerving and fearless policy of bringing you similar solutions to our own if we believe that they will add value to what you are doing, you may wish to check out the Marketing NPV site.

They have a whole pile of tools similar to our own, and we are delighted to see that they tend to leap to many of the same conclusions, e.g. that brand/customer loyalty should be tracked using very few questions. Well, actually, that is more Fred Reichheld’s idea, but he is right and we agree.

Money too tight to mention?

It may be rather short notice, but if you are into resource optimisation, Cranfield University have a conference coming up on the subject on 23 March.

One school represented at the conference does not really believe in budgeting at all. Presumably it is following the DCF (Discounted Cashflow) philosophy that states that any course of action that offers a better potential rate of return than your threshold rate should be funded.

The other school is into the predictive modelling of outcomes based on both hard and soft factors. We can do that! Well, actually, we can do both!

Did you know?

Yahoo! And AOL are planning to make businesses pay to deliver e-mails to their customers.

You did? OK.

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or by e-mail at enquiries@mudvalley.co.uk.

© 2006, Mud Valley ™ brand marketing community.

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