Robert Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion, first published in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion in 1984, remain among the most practically useful frameworks in marketing. Reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity describe how people actually make decisions, not how we wish they would. The problem is not the framework. The problem…
Cause marketing matters because it connects a brand to something customers care about beyond the product itself. Done well, it builds genuine affinity, earns attention from people who would otherwise ignore you, and creates the kind of brand association that compounds over time. Done poorly, it looks like exactly what it is: a company trying…
Honesty in marketing means accurately representing what your product does, who it is for, and what customers can expect from buying it. That sounds obvious. In practice, it is one of the hardest disciplines in the industry, because the incentives consistently push in the other direction. Most marketing dishonesty is not deliberate fraud. It is…
Influencer marketing strategy is the structured approach a brand takes to selecting creators, defining their role in the commercial funnel, and measuring whether the investment is actually doing anything useful. Done well, it reaches audiences that paid media cannot buy and builds the kind of trust that a banner ad never earns. Done badly, it…
Channel conflict in marketing happens when two or more distribution or sales channels compete for the same customers, undercutting each other’s margins, confusing buyers, or creating internal friction that slows growth. It is one of the most structurally damaging problems a go-to-market strategy can produce, and it is almost always avoidable with clearer thinking upfront….
The six steps in the decision-making process are: recognise a problem or need, gather information, evaluate the available options, make a choice, act on that choice, and review the outcome. That sequence applies whether someone is buying enterprise software or choosing a new supplier, and understanding where buyers are in it tells you more about…
The relationship between corporate operations and marketing operations is one of the most consequential and least examined dynamics in a business. When it works, marketing moves fast, spends well, and produces outcomes that the rest of the organisation can see and trust. When it breaks down, marketing becomes a cost centre that nobody quite believes…
Bad press is good press when it generates awareness that paid media cannot buy, forces a brand into public conversation, and compels audiences to form an opinion. The premise sounds like a rationalization for crisis management failures, but the commercial logic is harder to dismiss than most marketers want to admit. Not all negative coverage…
A connected customer experience is one where every touchpoint, from first awareness through to post-purchase, works together as a coherent experience rather than a series of disconnected interactions managed by separate teams with separate goals. Most companies do not have one. They have a collection of channels that happen to share a logo. The gap…
A perceptual map is a visual tool that plots how customers perceive competing brands across two or more dimensions, typically axes representing attributes like price, quality, innovation, or trust. It turns subjective brand perception into a spatial picture that shows where your brand sits relative to competitors in the minds of the people you are…
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