In the 1980s I had the privilege of working closely with consultants from McKinsey & Company, strategy partners to many Fortune 1000 firms and global non-profits. McKinsey’s value promise in a nutshell is, “We’ll help you reshape your industry to your advantage.” McKinsey recently released a report on mega-trends that will shape markets. It’s essential [...]

The blogosphere is aflutter with talk on Apple’s recent customer satisfaction issues linked to the new iPhone 4’s antenna design. A quiet whisper turned into thunderous noise once Consumer Reports decided to not recommend the phone because calls are dropped if the antenna is covered while in use (for example, by the user’s hand holding [...]

I spent the weekend in Scotland, where one cannot escape RBS’s logo, RBS standing for The Royal Bank of Scotland. Its brand imagery stands out exiting the airplane, passing city billboards, and reading or listening to local media. Today, the people of Scotland own close to 70 % of RBS because the former (duly fired) [...]

Last week’s post talked about the vital alignment between your brand platform and your value promise. A great example of getting the two concepts of brand and value promise wrong comes in a series of ads that Madison’s Capital Bank presents in the daily Wisconsin State Journal. Each ad contains a picture of one of [...]

A new client asked me a good question today. “You talk Kay about helping us find our value promise, but my communications agency is totally focused on our brand platform. What’s what and why does it matter?” The answer rests in understanding communication challenges. The internal communication challenge Employees need a shared and actionable aim [...]

Susan Boyle, a 47 year-old unemployed woman appeared as anything but a leading candidate for British Idol success. (Blockbuster American Idol and its British spin off are talent shows for amateur singing talents.) Prior to her appearance, Boyle had spent her adult life caring for aging parents in a small Scottish town. No wonder the [...]

Milk is bad for children’s bones. Superman became a serial murderer. Shocking, yes? But no less shocking than Toyota, the world-class manufacturing quality expert, recalling millions of cars across its product lines. Three generations after its founder created Toyota on a philosophy that built quality into every step, it turns out that Toyota’s quality has [...]

“You’ll find the style you want at the optometrist store on State Street,” my most stylish girlfriend advised. Sure enough, I walked into rack after rack of brands and styles upon entering the shop. While the amount of choice was reassuring at first glance – surely there is a look here for me – I [...]

From Oslo I attended an economic briefing from the Chief Economist of a major European bank yesterday. It was fascinating to hear the financial crisis and recession described from the perspective of the OECD, where the recession has been much worse than in North America. For example, Germany’s GDP fell 6.5% from its peak, with [...]

Will Web 3.0 shatter axioms behind your current business model? I am writing from in the future, thanks to a day with the University of Wisconsin Madison’s E-business Consortium conference. Experts are presenting the implications of Web 3.0 for marketing, supply chain management, IT infrastructure and information security. Aged-old assumptions underlying many business models no [...]