In their zest to prove themselves, it has become fashionable for marketers to gather together random tools of branding and start making them appear useful.  I have noticed this especially in people who are just starting out on new assignments, old horses in new races. Strategic replaces the ad-hoc, in interests of speed. They adopt and discard […]

A friend on LinkedIn recently asked me clarification on a question that one of his clients had posed to him:How frequently should a company call agencies for a pitch for annual Brand & Communication strategy?Is it safer and better to continue to deal with the same agency by renewing the contract annually for a few […]

A colleague, who I once had the good fortune to work with, had a peculiar decision-making quirk.Any and every decision was taken in the context of ‘what the competition is doing’! Be that crafting a strategy, participation in a show, a new advertisement, presentations, new brochures etc. Competitors were the benchmark of his professional life.Now […]

The etymology of ‘strategy’ comes from a Greek word stratēgía which means stratēg(ós) military commander + ēgos noun derivative of ágein (to lead) (re Thesaurus)In military usage, a distinction is made between strategy and tactics. Strategy is the utilization, during both peace and war, of all of a nation’s forces, through large-scale, long-range planning and development, to ensure security or victory. Tactics deals with the use and deployment of troops in actual combat.In today’s scenario, a lot of B2B organizations forget the critical difference between what comes first, strategy or tactics.They start with tactics, in a knee-jerk reaction to the market environment, and name it strategy. A classic case of cart leading the horse!B2B environments […]