Try this: Identify and map your opportunities BEFORE setting goals. From my experience this changeover usually results in a quite dramatic upgrade of goals and plans! It leads you to a much fuller understanding of your potential achievements, before you limit yourself to defined goals.

Clinton is already running a presidential campaign, i.e., attempting to build a long term brand. She is trying to inspire trust, while Senator Obama is spreading enthusiasm, taking advantage of the benefits of short term branding.

During your annual planning ritual - do you study and analyze the current situation in your market and then move on straight to setting your goals Thought so

A spate of recent articles about the Obama brand have, in my view as an expert on marketing, neglected the brand's strategy and focused its verbal or visual expressions But far more important is the distinction between the short-term brand, "Candidate Obama," and the long-term brand, "President Obama

This is how we, marketers, usually think: "Find out what they want, give it to them nicely wrapped and with a big shiny smile, and let the surveys show that they are satisfied" Good old Satisfying Marketing, right

The comforting secret is that you don't need to be different in everything in order to succeed, only in certain things.

The new method is called "Contextual Segmentation" - segmentation according to contexts of purchasing or using/consuming.

Once your Blue Ocean Strategy works, sooner or later someone will copy or even improve your already successful model, and your ocean will become red again. The critical question is: what can be done which is immune from imitations? Apparently the principle is simple. Introducing the Unfair Advantage.

In our hyper-competitive markets, MBA clones pose an imminent and tangible threat to the competitiveness of the companies they work for Many executives today attend the same MBA programs, study the same books, read the same newspapers and magazines, and go to the same conferences and workshops

Are you an MBA Clone Was your business education more like "business programming"

The vast red and blue oceans of the marketing world tsunamied into our awareness and vocabulary a few years ago, when two INSEAD professors, WChan Kim and Rene Mauborgne, claimed that competition can be rendered irrelevant

The Marketing Hits' Formula and its implementation method allows for marketing innovation that will be accepted with immediate enthusiasm by target consumers and will spread virally.The Marketing Hits' Formula and its implementation method allows for marketing innovation that will be accepted with immediate enthusiasm by target consumers and will spread virally.

The main reason for the general fascination with brands is their ability to provide the consumers an extra value in addition to what the product\service\company themselves can provide. A value which becomes the major motivation for consumers to desire the product.

The 'Marketing Strategy' is the way we have come up with for achieving our marketing goals and it should include two mandatory elements: - Which target consumers whom we can reach, hold a viable potential to buy whatever we intend to sell - What is the offer (the entire marketing mix) we will be presenting to these consumers in order to appeal to them and thus realize the said potential, given their alternatives

The main reason for the general fascination with brands is their ability to provide the consumers an extra value in addition to what the product\service\company themselves can provide A value which becomes the major motivation for consumers to desire the product

By definition, a luxury brand is an outstanding brand, justifiably priced highly and destined, at least primarily, to a select group of the social-economic elite Luxury is not about unattainability though

If you're trying to segment your market in the traditional way, what you may be looking for would be groups of consumers sorted out in such a way that a certain likeness exists within each group, and a difference exists between them The variable determining the meaningful likeness or difference between those groups would be the segmentation variable

The Old The old customary procedure of strategy development has a pure and sound logic It has been designed in order to answer the question: What is it that we should do in order to achieve our goals

From time to time the marketing world is taken aback by huge, quick, unpredictable and seemingly inexplicable successes These hits are products or services, entertainment locales or vacation spots, shopping malls or specialty stores that enjoy puzzling immediate popularity

What is Love Our starting point is to be clear as to what we mean by "love for a brand"

A successful differentiation is not imitated by your competitors, even though it brings you unmistakable success with consumers It seems impossible

Strategy - Very Scary Stuff I have encouraging news for you: many of your competitors are afraid of strategy You might call it strategophobia

About 95% of what executives in competing companies do is pretty much the same all around This is good management