CMOs advance their careers not by expanding their remit but by narrowing their focus to what actually moves the business. The most effective marketing leaders I have watched progress are the ones who resist the pressure to own everything and instead build a reputation for commercial clarity in a function that is often short on…
Fear drives action because it triggers one of the most primitive decision-making systems in the human brain. When people perceive a threat, whether physical, financial, social, or reputational, they shift from deliberative thinking to protective behaviour. In advertising, that mechanism can be pointed at a product or service with striking effectiveness. But it only works…
Forrester’s approach to performance marketing strategy has shaped how many organisations think about go-to-market execution, accountability, and growth measurement. The core argument is sound: connect marketing activity to revenue outcomes, build repeatable systems, and stop celebrating inputs when what matters is results. But like most frameworks that travel well through consulting decks and conference keynotes,…
A customer is the person who buys what you sell. A stakeholder is anyone with a vested interest in your organisation, your decisions, or your outcomes. The distinction sounds straightforward. In practice, most companies blur it constantly, and that blurring costs them in ways that rarely show up cleanly on a dashboard. When you build…
A competitor analysis model is a structured framework for evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, positioning, and strategic priorities of your direct and indirect competitors. The right model turns scattered observations into a coherent picture you can act on. The wrong one produces a slide deck that sits in a shared drive and changes nothing. Most competitive…
A SWOT analysis of a company maps four dimensions: internal strengths and weaknesses the business controls, and external opportunities and threats it faces. Done properly, it creates a shared picture of where a company actually stands, not where management assumes it stands. Done poorly, it becomes a wall of bullet points that everyone agrees with…
Google’s acquisition of Wiz for $32 billion is the largest acquisition in the company’s history. It is also one of the clearest examples in recent memory of what a go-to-market strategy looks like when it is built around genuine market position rather than product features alone. Wiz did not sell to Google because it had…
Customer experience has three distinct dimensions: ease, effectiveness, and emotion. Ease measures how little effort a customer has to spend. Effectiveness measures whether they actually got what they came for. Emotion measures how the interaction made them feel. Most organisations focus on one or two of these and wonder why satisfaction scores stay flat. The…
A marketing qualified buying group is a cluster of stakeholders within a target account who have collectively demonstrated enough engagement to warrant sales attention. Unlike the traditional MQL, which scores an individual contact, the MQBG treats the purchase decision as what it actually is: a group activity. In B2B, rarely does one person buy anything…
Competitive link analysis is the process of examining which websites link to your competitors, how those links are structured, and what that pattern reveals about where authority is being built in your market. Done properly, it tells you more about a competitor’s strategic positioning than almost any other signal available to you. The mechanics are…
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