Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to speak at Dine America, the invitation-only conference for senior executives in foodservice, produced by QSR Magazine. Insights from my session, The Price is Right (winning pricing strategies for QSRs) will be featured in an upcoming edition of my monthly column with the magazine. In the meantime, I […]
Eliminating co-pilots; offering standing-only cabins; asking customers to work the baggage conveyor belt – these are the things Michael O’Leary dreams of. As CEO of Ryanair, O’Leary loves to propose provocative potential developments for his airline. Does he do it because he’s a rabble-rousing PR machine or because he’s a shrewd businessman – or both? […]
Sheryl Adkins Green, Global Vice President of Brand Development for the iconic cosmetics brand Mary Kay Inc., is my guest for today’s interview. She has some important insights to share about how to build a brand across many different countries and cultures. She speaks not only about understanding the differences and commonalities among women around […]
Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s publication of its “The Popularity Issue: America’s most popular products and how they got that way” makes some fascinating statements about today’s business culture — but not because of the items it named (although those do make for an interesting read.) The fact that a business publication would devote an issue to things […]
In a post earlier this week, I started to address why some companies don’t operationalize their brands. I suggested that there are 3 kinds of business leaders who fail to leverage the full potential of their brands. […]
Those of you who are Star Trek fans would have felt right at home with me the other day. I went to check out the new Microsoft store which just opened at Fashion Valley mall here in San Diego because I wanted to do a compare/contrast to the Apple store in the same mall. My […]
Now that summer is officially here, I wanted to take a look back at the past 6 months and see what kinds of conversations had been sparked by brand-as-business bites™. The following are the top posts from each month in terms of number of re-tweets, comments, or emails they generated – I’ve also included some […]
I was fascinated by the story told in a recent strategy+business piece about Herman Miller, Inc., the “office-furniture maker.” That descriptor belongs in quotation marks because it seems the company is as adept at building breakthrough business practices as it is its cool Aeron chairs. The article offers a peak into the great company behind […]
I’m working on two big and juicy brand repositioning projects. While both involve quite significant departures from the companies’ current strategies and it’s still pretty early on in the projects, it’s likely one is going to be successful and the other, not, or at least less so. I thought the reason for the difference between […]
Last week I had the pleasure of serving as a panelist on the marketing track for the 26th Annual Southern California Business Growth Conference. Co-hosted by the Harvard Business School Association of Orange County and USC Marshall Alumni Association, the conference attracted over 1,000 of the region’s elite business leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs. […]