I'm off to Japan today for a week at NanoTech 2011. Its been a couple of years since I was in Japan. Its a country I love. A few westerners that I know find it frustrating to do business in Japan. I relish it. Japan, they say is the one country in the world where […]
The economics of content. Way back in another lifetime there was a great music publisher by the name of Lou Levy. Lou had a lot of great sayings, that I believe he originated. His son, Leeds, used to toss these sayings out from time to time to make a point. One of them was, “There […]
It must be one of those weeks. This morning I got a skype message from my friend, Ervin, in San Francisco, to tell me the sad news that Bruce Jackson had died in a plane crash in Palm Springs over the weekend. Bruce was one of the legends of the live sound business in Australia […]
I first met Leon Kane Maquire in 2009 when I was asked to write a commercialization strategy for the Australian Centre of Research Excellence for Electromaterials (ACES). When I start work on a project that requires strategy I normally start with the people, and ask them to tell me why they are doing what they […]
People invariably don't understand how marketing works. Even marketers don't understand. They think that if they buy more spots on TV, make a harder hitting ad, they will sell more product. They think that if they shout louder, they will get their ideas across more effectively. The reality is that they marketers are generally like […]
Apparently 2010 was a year of change… I just got an email from LinkedIn to advise that 96 of my connections changed jobs during the last year. I just checked to find out how many connections I have in this network – 638. So that means that 15% of my contacts changed jobs, which happens […]
I have done a fair bit of capital raising over the years (both for listed and unlisted companies) and every time one does it, it requires a new approach. More often than not I am asked to help with an unlisted company that is a start up. The general rules that have worked for me […]
I spent the weekend in Byron Bay with my old friend, Wayne Young, talking about movie production, new business models for content and how the digital world is changing everything… Wayne was responsible for some of the great Australian communication memes of the 70's and 80's including the “Its Time” campaign for the Labour Party […]
Last night I went to a belated Thanksgiving dinner at some friends, one of whom is American. One of the guests was a journalist who I haven't seen for at least 15 years – Bruce Elder. (Bruce is one of the most knowledgeable music journalists I have ever met and was incidentally a big supporter […]
I have had a number of branding jobs over the last few months. What is interesting about developing brands is that every job is totally different. Developing a brand architecture for an enterprise requires for there to be a real insight into how the model works, what the underlying brand promise is, and most of […]