Misleading correlations occur when two variables move together in a way that looks meaningful but shares no causal relationship. In marketing, they are everywhere, and they are expensive. When you build strategy around a correlation that does not hold up under scrutiny, you are not making data-driven decisions. You are making confident mistakes. The problem…
Porter’s Five Forces is one of the most widely taught frameworks in business strategy, and one of the most superficially applied. The model, developed by Michael Porter, maps the five competitive pressures that determine how attractive an industry is and where power actually sits: rivalry among existing competitors, the threat of new entrants, the threat…
The October 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review landed at a moment when the strategy conversation was shifting. The dominant frameworks of the 1990s, Porter’s five forces, the resource-based view, competitive positioning, were being stress-tested by faster markets and more complex competitive dynamics. What that issue captured, across several essays and case studies, was a…
Empathetic marketing is the practice of building strategy around a genuine understanding of what your audience actually feels, fears, and needs, rather than what you assume they want to hear. It is not about being warm or emotionally expressive in your copy. It is about doing the harder work of understanding the human on the…
A purpose-driven product strategy isn’t about mission statements or brand values printed on a wall. It’s about building products around a clear answer to one question: what problem does this actually solve, and for whom? When that question is answered honestly, every downstream decision, from pricing to positioning to go-to-market sequencing, gets easier. When it…
Consumer preference for brands that take social responsibility seriously has shifted from a nice-to-have to a commercial variable. Brands that treat social responsibility as a positioning decision, rather than a PR exercise, are seeing measurable differences in loyalty, premium tolerance, and long-term equity. Those that treat it as window dressing are increasingly being called out…
Bad data is not a technical problem sitting in your IT department’s backlog. It is a business problem that compounds quietly, distorting every decision made above it. When the data feeding your marketing strategy is incomplete, inconsistent, or simply wrong, every plan built on top of it inherits those flaws, and most organisations never trace…
Strategy is one of the most overused words in marketing, and one of the least understood. Most of what gets called strategy is actually planning: a list of activities, a media schedule, a content calendar dressed up in confident language. Real strategy means making deliberate choices about where you will compete and where you will…
Marketing myopia is the tendency to define your business by what you sell rather than the problem you solve, leading to strategies that protect today’s revenue at the expense of tomorrow’s growth. Theodore Levitt named it in 1960, but the pattern it describes is not a relic of mid-century boardrooms. It shows up constantly, in…
Price elasticity of demand measures how much the quantity demanded of a product changes when its price changes. If a 10% price increase causes demand to fall by 20%, demand is elastic. If it barely moves, demand is inelastic. That ratio, simple as it sounds, sits at the centre of almost every meaningful pricing and…
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