Marketing Intelligence

Stakeholder strategy is the discipline of identifying, prioritising, and managing the relationships with people who have influence over your marketing programme, whether they control budget, approve campaigns, set business objectives, or simply have the power to slow things down. Get it right and marketing moves faster, lands better, and earns more internal credibility. Get it…

Getting feedback from customers is one of the most commercially valuable things a business can do, and one of the most consistently mishandled. Most companies treat it as a compliance exercise: send a survey after a transaction, track an NPS score quarterly, report the number upward. What they rarely do is build a feedback system…

Demand forecasting is the process of estimating how much customer demand exists for a product or service over a given time period, using historical data, market signals, and structured assumptions to inform decisions about inventory, budget, headcount, and go-to-market timing. Done well, it gives leadership a working model of the future. Done badly, it gives…

Segmentation strategy is the process of dividing a market into distinct groups of customers who share common characteristics, then deciding which of those groups you can serve most profitably. Done well, it is the foundation of every go-to-market decision you make: which products to build, which messages to run, which channels to invest in, and…

A market positioning chart is a two-axis visual map that plots your brand and your competitors across two dimensions that matter to buyers, revealing where the market is crowded, where it is open, and where your positioning should live. Done properly, it turns a strategic conversation that usually runs in circles into something concrete enough…

A marketing positioning chart maps your brand against competitors across two axes that matter to your buyers, showing where you sit, where gaps exist, and whether the position you think you own is the one customers actually see. Done well, it turns a messy competitive landscape into a clear strategic picture. Done poorly, it flatters…

David Novak built Yum! Brands into a global restaurant empire, scaled KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell across more than 150 countries, and became one of the most studied executives in consumer business. His approach to leadership learning, specifically how he gathered feedback, acted on it, and embedded recognition into the operating rhythm of a…

The incomplete leader is not a failure in progress. They are the most commercially effective kind of leader there is, provided they know which pieces are missing and build around the gaps honestly. The leaders who have caused the most damage in agencies and marketing teams I have worked with were not the ones who…

Market segmentation is the process of dividing a broad target market into smaller, more defined groups of customers who share common characteristics, needs, or behaviours. Done well, it tells you exactly who to focus on, what to say to them, and where to spend your budget. Done poorly, it produces a slide deck full of…

Marketing myopia is the tendency of businesses to define themselves by what they sell rather than what their customers need, leading them to miss the broader market shifts that eventually make their products obsolete. Theodore Levitt introduced the concept in his 1960 Harvard Business Review essay, arguing that companies in declining industries had not failed…