Brands face the challenges of optimizing contradictory customer needs. This is because customers do not want to compromise one benefit for another. Leaders face the same challenges. Leaders must figure out ways to maximize seemingly uncompromising views, such as focusing on profitability and sustainability. Or focusing on core customers’ views while satisfying other customers’ views.
With somber accuracy Futurist Alvin Toffler once predicted; “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Who among us represents today’s illiterate? At the present pace of change, certainly, more marketers than we can imagine. We are either part of the old or part of the new.
Two functions within the firm, research and development and marketing, should be natural allies in facilitating the growth of the firm. Indeed, Peter Drucker stated that: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” It is the role of Research and Development (R&D) to create long-term sources of cash flow by developing innovative,...
The hotel industry uses a segmentation designed by consultancy STR that is all about price, service and amenities. This segmentation uses language that most humans would find bizarre when thinking about their hotel stay. No matter how many consultants provide insight to hotel groups, the default is always price, service and amenities. The STR hotel segmentations basically looks like this: Economy, Mid-Scale, Upper Mid-Scale, Upscale, Upper Upscale and Luxury.
Beware of “facts.” In our pursuit of data-driven decisions, we tend not to question facts, and rather focus on their implications. This is when big mistakes can happen. Consider the words of Peter Drucker, arguably the greatest management scholar of the past century:
