Most of us have probably at some point written a list of the pros and cons, or advantages and disadvantages, of a particular decision in our professional lives. Perhaps you’ve even written one for a personal choice – like Charles Darwin, who in 1838 created a list of the pros and cons of marriage, concluding in the end that the pros outweighed such disadvantages as having less money for books or perhaps not being able to live in London. Sometimes however, we need to frame a m

I’m fascinated by nominative determinism – the notion that our names can influence our professions or personalities. Usain Bolt, William Wordsworth, Tom Kitchin – to what extent was their path in life even slightly, subconsciously influenced by their name? Is it possible to invert the historical tradition of a a family surname originating from the profession of the bearer (as any Archer, Fletcher, or Mason could testify)? The ‘Feedback’ column in New Scientist magazine coined

'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' If there was one lecture at university that impacted my professional path more than any other, it was Mark de Rond’s very first ‘Introduction to Strategy’ at the Judge Business School. He posed the question ‘What is Strategy?’ to the assembled students, and received a few volunteered answers, which were all in the right postcode but didn’t quite seem to nail it. He then put a cartoon on the screen, an excerpt fro

Perhaps your business has just received private equity investment, or you’ve recently joined a private equity backed business as the Chief Marketing Officer. Your first board meeting is approaching, and you’ve been asked to create a marketing update to include in the board pack. You want to make a good impression but have no idea what is expected. It is firstly, important to understand how go-to-market is discussed in private equity board meetings and then work towards the be

Have you ever read the marketing section of your board pack month after month, read a long description of activities, but been unimpressed by the lack of any meaningful change in lead generation? You may be observing ‘Spray and Pray Marketing’ - a phrase that I find myself using to describe an approach to marketing that I think is generally to be avoided. As tends to be the case with English idiom, we rarely stop and think about the deeper meaning of such phrases and sitting

What’s the most effective, cheapest, and in every case where I’ve measured it, the biggest marketing channel that will never feature in your ROI reports or marketing section of the board pack? The answer is customer advocacy. In an age where consumers are constantly bombarded with advertisements, the trust in a recommendation from a peer stands apart. I’d like to unpack why this aspect of marketing is so significant. Customer advocacy as a marketing channel I’ve asked the ‘wh

Compared to its importance in post-deal value creation and frequency of discussion around the board table, Customer Acquisition rarely receives much explicit due diligence (DD) pre-deal. As a topic, it will, of course, be discussed frequently by Management and potential investors. But the emphasis will typically be to appraise Management’s key assumptions and decide on inputs for the investment case model, rather than a deeper analysis of opportunities and risks. Commercial D

Have you been frustrated by conversions about pricing you’ve had as part of a Management team, or as an investor? Throughout my time as both a strategy consultant and investor, pricing strategy has been a topic that has fascinated me. Whilst I’ve had many conversations with Management teams about pricing, I believe that price has been consistently underutilised as a value creation lever. This is why I thought I’d begin by sharing how I think about pricing, and why pricing str

I’ve run more than fifty primary customer research exercises and have probably made every mistake there is to make. This is one of those tasks that seems simple on the surface but the devil is in the detail. I want to share my checklist that any marketer or strategy consultant should use when preparing to run customer research, focusing on online, quantitative surveys. This guide is intended for customer research to inform internal choices about strategy and tactics. If you a

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a description of the customers that you would most like to acquire for your business. In other words. If one more customer walked in the front door, what do you want them to look like? The ICP is a more specific version of the long-used “target market” concept in marketing. The ICP, however, goes beyond demographic/firmographic information and can include customer problems, the triggers that have caused the customers to start considering a p

I’ve recently revisited Sam Savage’s "The Flaw of Averages: Why We Underestimate Risk in the Face of Uncertainty", a book he published in 2009 building on his original article from 2000. Savage’s concept is that decisions made based on average assumptions are often flawed due to overlooking the variability in data. Savage illustrates how this statistical pitfall can lead to disastrous outcomes across various fields, from finance and business to healthcare and climate change,

Of course, this could be £100, £10,000 or £1 million depending on the size of your marketing budget today - but this one question has proven to be the most illuminating thing that you can ask a marketing leader (your Chief Marketing Officer, Marketing Director, Head of Marketing or equivalent). This is also an excellent question for marketing leaders to ask themselves. It helps you/them to understand both the strategy they’re pursuing and their understanding of what is workin

How many times have you seen a set of customer ‘pen portraits’? The format is ubiquitous, normally a series of densely written pages of text accompanied with a stock image of someone smiling into the camera and a generic name, where we are told many specific, qualitative traits that our young professional or retired couple customer possesses – where they shop, their attitudes to politics, whether they have sugar in their coffee. The problem with this approach to customer segm

Around two thirds of trackable web traffic comes from search engines, whether from paid listings (paid search or PPC) or organic/free listings (organic search or search engine optimisation - SEO). The chances are that search represents a very meaningful source of online traffic, leads and customers for your business – even if it is at the start of a long B2B purchase journey. It follows that when you are setting your digital marketing strategy, you should be seeking to unders

LTV, or customer lifetime value, is one of the most important metrics for your business to understand. It equates to your ability to turn your proposition and customer relationships into monetary value over time. When combined with your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), the LTV:CPA ratio demonstrates the fundamental unit economics of your business, and how efficiently you can grow. To help bring the theory of LTV and the LTV:CPA ratio to life, I wanted to take three real-world exa

Working as both a marketing leader and an investor, a constant challenge has been to prioritise among the myriad ways that I could spend my time. As Elton so wisely sang in Disney’s Lion King; there’s ‘more to do than can ever be done’. Among the many tools I've used to help me prioritise tasks, one that has proven to be invaluable is the Eisenhower Matrix, also known as the Urgent-Important matrix. This decision-making tool traces its origins to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34t

‘Is the marketing function in your organisation a cost centre or a profit centre?’ This is a question I’ve asked many times, both as a consultant and an investor. It is shorthand for ‘do you understand the role of your marketing function in driving growth?’ and ‘how mature is your marketing function?’ Often, the answer to this question will be ‘a cost centre’. This is normally the case for SMEs and especially those selling to other businesses (B2B). I’m going to explain why y

What is Marketing Attribution? Marketing attribution is the process of determining how different marketing activities contribute to customer acquisition and retention. It plays a critical role in measuring the effectiveness of marketing efforts and helps businesses to optimise their budgets and strategies for maximum return on investment (ROI) and minimum waste. Purchase journeys starting today are more likely than not to start online, whether they are B2C or B2B (the stats a

It goes without saying that being able to efficiently acquire new customers is integral to long-term profitable growth. But what if it your capability to acquire new customers became a source of sustainable competitive advantage in the same way that superior scale, proprietary data, long term customer relationships or hard to get accreditations are? Sustainable competitive advantage is typically defined as the ability to outperform competitors in a way that is very hard for c

The ratio of Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) to Cost Per Acquisition (CPA or CAC) is one of the most important commercial metrics for any business. It represents the fundamental unit economics of customer acquisition and how efficiently a business is able to grow. In simple terms it is the return on investment (ROI) of marketing spend. In spite of this, in my experience most Management teams of small and mid-market businesses have never calculated LTV:CAC. You can understand wh