Dodo Loves Marketing

There’s a great deal you can learn from spending time with your strugglers. You can learn why certain systems are hard to operate. You can learn why initiatives are poorly designed. You can learn why clients become unhappy. And over time, you can become, as some managers are, highly articulate in describing the anatomy of failure and its various cures.

Ironically, none of this is going to help you understand what excellence looks like. You cannot learn very much about excellence from studying failure. Of all the infinite number of ways to perform a certain task, most of them are wrong. There are only a few right ways. Unfortunately you don’t come any closer to identifying those right ways by eliminating the wrong ways. Excellence is not the opposite of failure. It is just different. It has its own configuration, which sometimes includes behaviors that look surprisingly similar to the behaviors of your strugglers. ..more

• Read More »

In an age in which customers are scarce, any company’s best practices seldom remain proprietary. Business models are shamelessly imitated with inner corporate workings becoming public knowledge. Best practices travel at Internet speed.

People are becoming masters at imitation. If you don’t have a good idea yourself, you can always knock off someone else’s product. An imitation is not necessarily an exact copy. You use details to create a difference: the look, the product extension, the packaging—anything that can make the other company’s idea look less new And this is easier than it used to be. If once you could hold on to a secret formula for years or even decades, now it’s a matter of months or days before your competitors catch up and replicate it. ..more

• Read More »