Wild Thinking

Wild Thinking, 26 Unconventional Ideas to Grow Your Brand and Your Business, by Nick Liddell and Richard Buchanan, Kogan Page 2019 

    You are called in to perform a pre-mortem on your brand. 

    You predict the cause of death will come from... Martin Brooks, co-founder Shackleton

It's not enough to be a great company happily shipping popular product.  To be as successful as the companies cited by authors Liddell and Buchanan - Google, Twining, Dropbox, McLaren, and Wimbledon -  you're going to need an equally strong brand.  But as so many well-meaning entrepreneurs and traditional producers have learned from experience, most big brands didn't grow accidentally successful.  And sometimes the strategies that make good product flows are not the same ones that build the brand.

    Does your team operate like an orchestra or an improvisational jazz band?  Nick Morris, head of PR & Communication,                                                                                        EMEA Dropbox

The answers may be counter-intuitive.  The authors work from 25 questions that explore different aspects of branding and strategy as a starting point.  The questions will take leaders through a discovery journey to look at the competition as well as potential for action.  If your team can answer even a handful of these critical 25 questions, they will have discovered possible branding shifts:

*  Who or what is your brand's nemesis?

*  Is your role to make people want things or make things people want?

*  What's the most offensive word in the world in relation to your brand?

*  Outside the world o business, where do you look for inspiration?

*  What disappoints you most about your competitors?

*  What does the word "quality" mean in the context of your brand?

The new word I learned from this book is backcasting - articulating a vision and then working backwards to identify the steps required to achieve the desired end state.  Although the current trend, say the authors, is to shape strategy around a bold, ambitious long-term goal, the reality is that progress is not continuous toward a stated goal. 

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, pemoody@aol.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, tricia@patriciaemoody.com,