For longer than I can care to remember, marketers have tried to dictate brand loyalties to consumers and foster this within them. Our earliest retail purchases perhaps end up setting the tone for years to follow. I loved Adidas as a kid, and the love affair was strong for many a year. Then, for a long time (and even now), it is Puma for me. Perhaps it is something else you love as a brand. Over in Australia, my friends down under tell me that as a man or a motorsports enthusiast, you either follow Ford or Holden. Brand loyalty is a powerful thing, and it is what brands use to hold sway over us. The older we get, the less  [...]

Using a business accelerator to grow your business might be the wisest thing you could have chosen to do in a long time. But before we kick things off, a point has to be made. Don’t confuse a business incubator and a business accelerator. A business incubator will offer a common location for a number of fledgling businesses to work. More than services, they will offer the equipment you need and the networking and mentoring you need to get things off the floor. Most of these business incubators were linked to colleges and universities where these programs and facilities were instituted to try and encourage the growth of entrepreneurship. But  [...]

The Twitter Bird, as Twitter's logo has come to be called, is a very memorable logo indeed. But none of the founders came up with it, and they certainly didn't get it from some highly paid marketing expert nor a team of designers putting their brains together. That bird came from the users. Very soon after the site was launched in 2006, users started to refer to their messages as “tweets”. And what better to represent tweets than a bird? Twitter considered strongly how users use and consider the brand and they are much better off for it. Like billions of dollars better off for it. That's the power of business logos. The  [...]

Traditionally speaking, leadership has always been a top-down process with those higher up the pecking order giving the orders and those lower down the hierarchy scurrying to get things down. It's a bit like the relationship between a puppet master and a puppet. But thought leadership is just drastically different to traditional leadership. It has nothing to do with the position you hold or whether you manage people. It doesn't even matter if you are low down the organizational hierarchy. Thought leadership is no one's monopoly either and while coming up with the idea is one thing, its implementation still rests with the managerial  [...]

Everyone you ever meet will have a tale of a failed leader and one that has been successful in a different organizational context. Sometimes, that's true even for the same organization. Every leader has their own set of challenges and their own style to apply to it. Some will be more vocal, shouting and remonstrating loudly. Others will watch and observe mannerisms and speak their mind through their own mannerisms. No two people are alike, and that's why leadership styles also vary. That's why you have to be very wary when conducting succession planning exercises. It is a very challenging to-do on any businessman's checklist. The  [...]