I don’t like Paranoia. Excessive fear of other people is a major social problem and encouraging it is just plain wrong. Thus I’m not a fan of Andy Grove’s “Only the Paranoid Survive” (Grove 1996). It is not that there aren’t decent stories in his book. Grove had a fascinating career and there are useful…
Category: Competition
Marketing And The Republican Autopsy
The Republican’s recently issued an interesting competitive analysis of how the party’s marketing operations stack up. The Growth and Opportunity Project has been dubbed the “Republican Autopsy” for accepting that the 2012 national elections were a disaster for the party. The major criticism of the report is that it excludes policy consideration. To critics the report is…
Ron Paul’s Marketing Lesson
Politics can teach us a lot about marketing. Ron Paul’s story teaches us more than most. I’m not a Ron Paul follower but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from what he has done well and his problems. When we teach marketing we suggest trying to serve the tastes of consumers, “the marketing concept”. Such…
Being One-Dimensional
In a positioning map there aren’t many absolute requirements. A requiremement that really must be kept however is that each axis represents a single dimension. If you try to have more than one dimension on each axis it isn’t so much a map as a mess dumped onto a page. “Practical” is not the same as…
Beating Rivals
Is the goal of business to do the best you can or to beat others? A surprising number of people seem to think business is about beating others. The technical term is competitor orientation — when your ultimate objective is to beat your competitors. Why is competitor orientation wrong? If you believe your duty is…
Boring Positioning Maps
I often discuss mistaken thinking, this is different. I’m discussing something worse than being wrong and that is being boring. A positioning map illustrates marketing strategies. Here I discuss the axes of which there are two generic types. Where there is no universally agreed best, e.g. taste based dimensions, like the spiciness of food. Where…