Fiction, Hollywood blockbusters and business have a heck of a lot in common. The journey from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is exactly the same irrespective of whether you’re reading the latest romantic fiction, watching an epic film or getting your startup off the ground from your back room.
If I told you that you could make a million dollars in two weeks, from home, using Google your scam-detection radar would go on overdrive. In most cases you would be right but here’s one scenario where one person, actually did just that.
As I am writing this it’s been 49 years since JFK was assassinated. Millions of words and thousands of hours of filming have been devoted to discovering who was behind his death. What is of greater interest to us, however, is not who, but why.
Situation Analysis: You are the world’s pre-eminent web company dominating every particular vertical that requires search to help navigate it. You have nascent products across every emerging digital frontier from phones to virtual wallets and augmented reality glasses. Unfortunately you are moving faster than your customer base who are all too-easily distracted by the shiny toys of smaller in breadth but equal in depth competitors. What do you do?
Search is synonymous with Google. So much so that Google is a verb meaning “search for it online using a search engine’. With that kind of achievement you’d think they are pretty secure in their core market, especially since their accumulation of data is such that it simply puts them ahead of every other newcomer.
For anyone who was alive and kicking in the 70s Twinkies was right up there with ABBA, glitter, leotards and hot pants. It was the snack food of the moment that contained, within its partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil, sugar, water and starch content, the soul of a decade.
As a blogger I try hard to avoid rants and maintain some journalistic impartiality. Part of it is the result of years of working as a journalist and part of it is my own consciousness of the fact that I control my blog, my word is that of god here and it is all too easy to turn it into a soapbox where I work out my pet peeves.
“I want my website on the first page of Google” has been a constant request for SEOs ever since there was a search engine optimization industry to talk about. On the face of it that’s a natural enough request. Whether it is driven by ignorance of the effort it takes to get there or sheer competitiveness, the end-result is the same: webmasters end up competing for one of only ten places on Google’s first page.
I am frequently fond of the technique of using popular culture to revisit critical lessons on marketing and social media and Skyfall is too good an opportunity to pass up. A movie of two halves with a climactic finish that succeeds in breathing life into the franchise once again, the latest Bond movie also hits some pretty important marketing buttons.
Can we honestly learn to make better business decisions if we learn to think like snipers? Those of you who have been following my posts already know that I think equating business with war has been one of the greatest mistakes marketing has ever made.
