Most businesspeople would be pleased to own a profitable business that was a pioneer in its category, had a stellar brand reputation, and generated more than a billion dollars in annual revenue. Yet, in 2012, IBM got rid of just such a business when it sold its retail point-of-sale (POS) business to Toshiba.
Recently, the research and marketing community quietly lost one of its brightest, most innovative thinkers and practitioners.
It’s hard to tell if something is good or bad unless we have something else to compare it to. A standard of comparison. A reference point.
The Kantar BrandZ world’s most valuable brands report is out, and it’s sobering. The world’s top 100 most valuable global brands lost 20% of their value in 2023, and across the 13 vertical categories tracked, every one experienced a decline.
When my wife and I moved cities in 2018, I purged some of the stuff I’d been keeping for years, and in the process, I ran across an essay that my 16-year-old self had written for a college scholarship application (which I did not get). It read in part, “I am interested in the art of persuasion…[W]hat conditions and evidence will convince one person and not another. I think that this is a very important...
