Think Out Loud - Amplified thinking on business and brands

ABOUT TOL

Think Out Loud is a blog brought to you by the team at ThinkTank - a catalytic consultancy specialising in strategic marketing, branding and innovation based in Cork, Ireland.


PEOPLE@THINKTANK

picture of Jonathan Amm

Jonathan Amm

picture of Lisa Murphy

Lisa Murphy


BRAIN FOOD

POSITIONING: THE BATTLE FOR YOUR MIND
Al Ries and Jack Trout (McGraw-Hill Trade, 2000). (***)
6 thinking hats by edward de bono
SIX THINKING HATS Edward de Bono (Little, Brown and Company, 1985).(**)
blue ocean strategy
BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne (Harvard Business School Press, 2005). (****)
BUILT TO LAST James C. Collins and Jerry I.Porras (1994, HarperBusiness Essentials).(****)

SITES WE LIKE


TOP BLOGS

People ignore design that ignores people

24 September 2010

Good design is good business. Yet it’s amazing how few good business people recognize and understand the commercial value of good design.

Think about how every day poorly designed products and services add complexity instead of simplicity to our lives. The tortuously convoluted language used by the financial services industry, the non-intuitive features on electronic gadgets that most of us will never fathom, big call centres that tell you what they can’t do instead of what they can, antiquated recruitment practices that tick boxes instead of identifying talent and newspaper layouts that are cluttered with ads all fighting for attention like kids on a sugar rush! The universe may contain intelligent design but many products and services certainly do not!

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Know your customer before somebody else does

2 August 2010

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FACT: One in five Irish Enterprises fail according to the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association. In many instances they fail due to a lack of understanding of their customers and market place.

Post-recession shoppers are a completely different breed when compared to what has gone before. They’ve been profoundly impacted by a feeling of deprivation the recession caused and the way in which they’ve coped with it. Now they are more demanding than ever and their expectations are increasingly high. We all know shoppers are fickle and the days of being completely loyal to one brand or company are gone. Shoppers have been conditioned to search out the best price and value during these recessionary times yet they can be swayed at the point of purchase to make very different decisions. Other factors like emotions also come into play, hence the contradiction in terms, when you hear that more than one in two customers claim to be cutting down on treats but sales of premium products such as ice cream and chocolates are on the rise. How can that be?

Business consultancy Deloitte released an interesting research report just this week in New York where they talked about a ‘paradigm shift’ in consumer purchasing habits in the US. It found that a whopping 84% of households were examining their spending in every category to try and save money while 79% believed they were ‘smarter’ shoppers than they were two years ago. But it also found that 75% believed that the financial crisis had caused them to realise ‘which brands I really care about and which ones are less important to me’ and that there were only two or three brands which they ‘could not live without’.

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