Author Archives: Steve McKee
The longer I’m in the business world the more I treasure the rare and refreshing virtue of humility. We’re all imperfect people, and marketing is an imperfect business where subjective decisions rule the day—unlike science, engineering and even accounting, there are no tenets of physics, mathematics or even generally accepted accounting principles that can definitively determine whether something is right or wrong, true or false, or will or will not work. Continue reading
Accenture recently surveyed 200+ B2B companies with revenues of more than a billion dollars and found that a large majority agree on the importance of social media. So far so good. But they also found that only eight percent of those companies are heavily engaged in social media today. Why the discrepancy? Continue reading
According to a study by Booz & Co., more than two-thirds of large companies increased their investment in innovation last year, making up much of the ground lost to draconian cuts many made over the past three years. Continue reading
Plenty of people are piling on Netflix, and I don’t want to be a Monday-morning quarterback and question CEO Reed Hastings for his decision to backtrack after splitting the company in two. Netflix had already riled its customers with a price hike and apparently wasn’t prepared for the hue and cry the split would create. That’s easy to see in retrospect. Continue reading
Innovation is the lifeblood of any corporate growth strategy; companies that are content to stand still will be always passed by those who consistently think ahead. Yet innovation doesn’t always require mindbending, groundbreaking, out-of-the-box ideas. Sometimes innovations can come from simply making new connections or looking at things in a different light. Call them renovations. I was reminded of this by the picture at left. It looks like a page from a chemistry textbook, but it’s not. It’s a snapshot of one section of the lab report from my blood test taken during a routine physical exam. It’s all Greek to me–and to anybody else who hasn’t spent a dozen years in college, I suspect. But why? The point of a physical exam is to stay healthy; if everyone wants me to be healthy–my doctor, my insurance company, ME – why is my lab report written in a foreign language? … Continue reading
In a sad but eerily familiar tale, The Wall Street Journal’s Julie Jargon and Mike Spector recently recounted the tragic circumstances facing Quiznos, the once-hot toasted sandwich chain. Double-digit sales declines, massive store closings, internal infighting—you name it, Quiznos is facing it. Without recounting all the gory details, Quiznos is a poster child for nearly every one of the seven growth-killing factors I highlight in When Growth Stalls. A deadly combination of the interminable recession, an ill-timed leveraged buyout and a series of powerful punches from arch-rival Subway (among other competitors) knocked the company for a loop. Add to that a crippling management/franchisee misalignment and a loss of focus, and it’s no surprise that Quiznos lost its nerve (a million-sandwich giveaway?) and any pretense of consistency in its brand positioning and value equation. What now? That’s the question facing the chain and its creditors. The answer, while not easy, …
