It's a wonderful time to be in retail. Modern AI is helping us see past the restrictive, budget-burning, backward-looking tactics that chasing 'comps' drags us into.
Instead, we now have an entirely new set of metrics, customer insights and disarmingly accurate predictions to build a purposeful, forward-looking growth strategy around. (Read more)

The brands that dominate aren't just well-distributed, they're strategically coherent at every touchpoint. So if your marketing team is over-indexing on Byron Sharp's principles but skipping over the strategy, dig into core questions Roger Martin always asks.

Landing the brand narrative is electrifying for leaders because it helps them to step out from behind their desks and spend time with staff, customers, communities, and investors. Not because they have to, but because they've got a story worth telling that they deeply believe in.

It's hard work to be a leader when everyone is pushing in different directions. That's why your positioning and narrative are so important internally as much as externally. They create an operationally organising direction that means everyone understands and is aligned with what they are contributing to when they get to work on a Monday morning.

As one CEO recently said to me, " A clear positioning is the difference between climbing and surfing!”

Your brand has a specific job to do. It must present a clear, compelling and differentiated positioning that delivers the business goal and, as Peter Drucker asserted all those years ago, that goal is to create and keep a customer