.png?width=1500&height=398&name=CO_Corporate%20Logo%202021_4C_HOR_FNL-1%20(1).png)
AI Strategy for Financial Services CEOs: Why “Good Enough” is no Longer Enough
AI in financial services has moved from lofty claims about AI's use to being at the center of the growth conversation, shaping how you compete, run, and stay trusted. Margins are under pressure as customers benchmark you against their best digital experiences, whether they are opening a checking account, redeeming loyalty points, disputing a card charge, or seeking hardship help.
Shift Your Brand Perception – Tips for Getting Your Positioning to ‘Stick’
Thu, Oct 4, 2018 — After reading my previous posts, you’re almost on your way to productively and energetically leveraging your brand’s perception to drive company growth and profitability. Our previous topics of focus covered the specific impact that brand perception can have on the bottom line, the need for clear positioning as the foundation for communicating about your company, and some keys to arming others with that positioning so they can get your story into the market. Now, I’ll review the most important tips on what it takes to get your positioning to stick – to successfully change brand perception to accelerate growth and profitability.
Shift Your Brand Perception – Rally Others to Tell Your Story
Thu, Sep 27, 2018 — After reading my previous posts, you’re almost on your way to productively and energetically leveraging your brand’s perception to drive company growth and profitability. Our previous topics of focus covered the specific impact that brand perception can have on the bottom line and the need for clear positioning as the foundation for communicating about your company. It’s now time to examine effective ways to arm others with that refined market positioning. By understanding your story, employees, customers and other influencers will help you communicate this information to your marketplace. This strategy takes some of the pressure off your sales team. It also makes it easier to proliferate your vision, as well as the value of your product and service offerings. One of the biggest challenges small to mid-size companies face is promoting their company with limited resources. Not everyone has massive advertising budgets to flood the market, so you need to work smarter to get the most out of your marketing spend. One way to do that is to more effectively leverage your employee base and others who have influence in your industry. It’s much more powerful when others can tell the story for you.
Shift Your Brand Perception - Start with Getting Your Positioning Right
Thu, Sep 20, 2018 — In my previous post, we reviewed how brand perception specifically impacts company growth and profitability. Now we’ll cover the keys to building the foundation for communicating about your company. When companies start out, they usually have a very clear understanding of who their customer is, the problem they are solving, and possibly, how they are different. This is typically because they have a single product for a single market segment where they’ve achieved some level of success. But over time, as companies and markets evolve: The competition becomes more intense, either through matching capabilities, building new capabilities or new competitors appearing. Customer needs and priorities change. What was important to a customer 3 years ago may not be as important today. The company enters new market segments or geographies. There may be subtleties between industries, regions and countries in terms of priorities and pain points. The company broadens its portfolio of offerings. As more products are developed and more problems addressed, there might be new buyers and other selling dynamics.
Need Higher Revenue Growth and Profitability? Start with your Company’s Image
Thu, Sep 13, 2018 — There are tens of millions of small businesses and corporations in the United States today. A deluge of brands, all with their own marketing campaigns, makes it more overwhelming than ever for potential customers to choose the right products or services for their needs. No matter how many advertisements or social media posts your target customers see, their willingness to select your company depends on how well they conceptualize, understand, and trust your brand, its offerings, and employees. It probably seems obvious that your organization’s image and perception is critical. Too often, however, companies fail to understand the distinct impact that weak brand perception can have on their bottom line. As a result, they may under-invest in developing and managing their brand, even as the consumer decision journey has changed so profoundly.
Growth Engine Roadmap, Metrics, and Financial Benefits
Fri, Jul 27, 2018 — If you have been following this series of articles on sustainable business growth, you know that we have arrived at our fifth and final topic. If you missed the previous articles in the series, you can read Article 1 (The Difference Between a Growth Plan and a Growth Engine), Article 2 (Best Practices in Processes) and Article 3 (People and Organizational Best Practices), and Article 4 (Platforms: Playbooks and Tools).
Leveraging Market Change to Drive Growth: Four Steps to Becoming an Agile Organization
Tue, Jul 24, 2018 — In a 2017 letter to his shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos cautioned, “Day 2 is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death. And that’s why it is always Day 1 (at Amazon). The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you’re probably fighting the future. Embrace them, and you have a tailwind.” Your business environment is rapidly changing and more uncertain than ever. If you follow the lead of companies like Amazon that are committed to achieving high levels of organizational agility, you can leverage market changes to create a competitive advantage – and fuel growth. Put simply, a company’s organizational agility is its ability to renew itself, adapt quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, ambiguous, and turbulent environment.
How Platform Capabilities Sustain Business Growth
Tue, Jun 19, 2018 — If you have been following this series of articles on sustainable business growth, you know that we have arrived at our fourth topic: Platforms. If you missed the previous articles in the series, you can read Article 1 (The Difference Between a Growth Plan and a Growth Engine), Article 2 (Best Practices in Processes) and Article 3 (People and Organizational Best Practices).
Why Growing a Business is Harder Than Ever
Mon, Jun 18, 2018 — One of my daughters recently read Of Mice and Men in English class. Since I also read it in high school, it was fun to chat about the story as she progressed through the book. I wondered how Steinbeck came up with the title. It turns out he used a quote from a poem written by Robert Burns in 1785. The contemporary translation is, “the best-laid plans of mice and men.” The two main characters, Lennie and George, have a plan for a new life. Unfortunately, their reality ends up being far from what they hoped.
How People and Organizational Capabilities Sustain Business Growth
Thu, May 31, 2018 — If you have been following this series of articles on sustainable business growth, you know that we have arrived at our third topic. The first article introduced the difference between a growth plan (singular event) and a growth engine (recurring system). The theme we developed in that piece supported the need to go beyond growth plans to create sustained growth performance. Our argument that while growth plans are good, growth engines are better.