NEED insight

There was a line in an old physics school report of mine that has always stayed with me.   “He understands the subject fully, and will not let any point pass that he has not completely mastered.”   You can take that in two ways, can’t you? Particularly with the comma, which was definitely there.   Thinking back, I probably should have stuck with physics. But I decided to do an Engineering degree instead, which I didn’t find interesting.   So when it came to leaving, I scrambl

Marketing isn’t simple. The problem is we all desperately want it to be.   So we try to make the discipline into a science. All that’s done is turn everything into an argument about who’s right and who’s wrong.   We’ve done brand versus performance, penetration versus loyalty, distinctiveness versus differentiation. Now it’s AI versus human.   The closest we get to wisdom is saying the answer is both. But that isn’t the real answer and deep down we know it.   Proper science i

I still love an occasional LinkedIn spat.   The latest one was prompted by a presentation by Mark Ritson in New York, where he again bemoaned how marketing people don’t know enough about marketing.   He’s often found doing this in the weeks before his next Mini MBA course (£1,949 + VAT).   The focus was a recent four-country survey that said, among other findings of ignorance, that 36% of marketeers can’t list the 4 P’s.   It was a summary of this speech by Tom Morton that pr

What exactly do we mean by a light buyer?   Do we mean an occasional buyer or a non-buyer or both?   Is it a light buyer of a brand or a category?   If it’s category, do you mean your view of the category or the buyer’s?   And are we talking once a month, once a year or once a lifetime?   I always try to imagine people I’ve actually met in a research group.   To start with, if they only buy a brand once in a blue moon, they’re going to be a nightmare to find.   Unless that on