Marketing Intelligence

A competitive analysis should not exclusively focus on direct competitors. Limiting your analysis to businesses that sell the same product or service in the same format misses the broader competitive reality your customers live in every day. The real competition is often not who you think it is. Customers do not organise their decisions around…

Strategy operates at multiple levels inside any organisation, and the level you are working at determines the decisions you can make, the resources you can access, and the results you can realistically expect. Corporate strategy sets direction for the whole business. Business unit strategy defines how a division competes. Functional strategy, which is where most…

A customer strategy framework is the structured approach a business uses to decide who it serves, how it retains them, and how it grows value from that base over time. It sits upstream of your marketing plan, your channel mix, and your messaging architecture. Get it wrong and no amount of campaign spend will compensate….

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Peter Drucker said it, and every agency CEO who has ever inherited a team, acquired a business, or tried to turn around a loss-making operation has felt it in their bones. Strategy is the easy part. Culture is where plans go to die. The phrase gets quoted constantly in boardrooms…

Organic growth means building revenue through your own efforts: better products, stronger marketing, deeper customer relationships. Inorganic growth means buying it: acquisitions, mergers, partnerships that bring new customers or capabilities overnight. Both work. Neither is automatically right. The question is which one fits your commercial situation, your risk tolerance, and the time you actually have….

Divestiture strategy is the deliberate process of selling, spinning off, or otherwise separating a business unit, brand, or asset to improve the overall health of the remaining portfolio. Done well, it sharpens focus, frees capital, and creates the conditions for genuine growth. Done badly, it strands customers, demoralises teams, and leaves the divested asset worth…

An informal leader is someone who influences colleagues, shapes decisions, and moves teams forward without holding a formal management title. They carry no positional authority, but they carry weight. And in most go-to-market functions, they are doing more to drive alignment and momentum than the org chart would ever suggest. Understanding who these people are,…

Culture and strategy are not opposites, and the famous Drucker-attributed line treating them as adversaries has done more damage to marketing organisations than most people care to admit. The real relationship is simpler: culture is the operating system on which strategy runs. Get the culture wrong and even a brilliant strategy will fail to execute….

Customer-based strategy is the practice of building your entire commercial approach around a specific, well-defined set of customers rather than broad market segments or demographic averages. It means making deliberate choices about who you serve, what you offer them, and how you allocate resources based on actual customer value rather than assumed market size. Most…

Leaders fight for their ideas by building the case before the room, reading the politics without being paralysed by them, and knowing when to push harder versus when to let the idea die with dignity. It is not about being the loudest voice. It is about being the most prepared one. Most marketers have had…