US Airways and Kimpton Hotels both compete in very crowded market spaces where price can make the difference in a consumer’s final selection.  But one of them knows how to move beyond price to compete on experience and the other doesn’t. On a recent trip to NYC, I flew on US Air because it [...]

I wonder if the editors of the January-February, 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review connected the dots among their articles. As a reader I did. “The 100 Best CEOs in the World” is the cover story for an issue that also includes the article “Strategic Leadership: The Essential Skills.”  Too many CEOs and their C-Suite [...]

Brand trust is harder to earn in today’s economy? The pressure to cut costs makes delivering day after day on promised benefits more challenging. Social media creates messages that listeners deem more reliable than your own. And retaining meaningful and hard-to-copy differentiation has become more challenging in our copycat global economy. Silicon leader Dow Corning [...]

The most powerful brands offer more than a unique, hard-to-copy and relevant value promise embracing both tangible and emotional benefits. They are also about more than the brand’s personality, although I will admit to loving beer brand Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” personality. The best brands appeal to a shared aspiration that [...]

All I wanted to do was change my Wall Street Journal digital Monday to Friday subscription back to a daily print subscription. Why? Because I found I was not reading enough of the business news as I had when the paper was physically delivered. I also wanted to retain my Saturday delivery subscription. Sounds easy [...]

Demographics don’t lie. They are one of the few external trends shaping organizational outcomes around which there is little if any controversy. The baby boom is aging. The voting electorate is getting more diverse. A critical question facing business models therefore is “What will be the impact of demographic trends on our future success?” The [...]

If you thought that the move from the Industrial Era to the Digital Era was the last major economic transition that your business would have to deal with, think again. We are in the middle of yet another transformation of comparable magnitude. The slow but steady shift of power away from companies and to customers [...]

As an experiment, I followed the world’s twitters during the first Obama-Romney presidential debate.  Amidst the flurry of messages passing by my eyes, I finally understood in my gut and not just my head how social media has changed the balance of power when it comes to controlling brand image. In an era when everyone [...]

The following quote (courtesy of a blog post by Esther Dyson, savvy internet investor) should be posted on billboards next to every large company, especially in Japan where once-great electronics giants face the Herculean challenge of reversing an accelerating decline. “Without order, planning, predictability, central control, accountancy, instructions to underlings, obedience, discipline — without these [...]

Has anyone noticed how many former market leaders are facing major revenue challenges? Sharp. Dell. Best Buy. HP. Penny’s. Pfizer. The list goes on and on.  Reading the news, I couldn’t help but notice the Wall Street Journal article “Yellow Pages Last Lifeline: Clinging to Each Other” and draw a connection to so many company [...]