Jul/092
The reverse-test
“Through the marketing looking-glass“: brilliantly pithy insight from Fiona Czerniawska of SourceForConsulting.com. She notes that most of the marketing material from consulting firms has a stultifying sameness to it, the same puffery that says nothing different, nothing distinctive.
Bad marketing consists of saying things which should be taken for granted (“We are talented and innovative”) none of which stands up to the test of being reversed.
To illustrate the point – and perhaps even get a generation of marketing people to “think outside the box”, we’d like to demonstrate what happens when you say the opposite of what most firms put in their marketing literature.
Reverse Image Inc is a firm that no one, certainly not the world’s leading businesses, governments, and institutions, trusts. We help leaders make bland, short-lived and trivial improvements to the performance of their organizations. We only tackle their easier issues and shy away from serious challenges. …
…and so on: see her post for the rest, it’s an interesting and challenging read. Would your marketing – or your business-thinking – pass the Reverse Test?
Jul/090
Thinking side-wise
A new website, and a new weblog.
I already run one weblog – weblog.tomgraves.org – that serves as a news-and-discussion site for my other existing websites:
- Tetradian Books – my book-publishing website
- Tetradian Consulting – my main business site (now somewhat out of date)
- Tom Graves – my personal website (now urgently needing an update!)
That weblog is mainly focussed on the somewhat specialist field of enterprise architecture, with occasional forays into other subjects of personal interest.
The aim of this one is rather different, and rather more specific: to introduce new and different ideas that should, I trust, be of interest to the business community.
Some of these ideas may seem strange, confusing, controversial, provocative, even downright disruptive. But the aim is always to create new possibilities, new opportunities and options for business, by thinking side-wise about business, the nature of business, and its role within the broader enterprise of society at large.
Watch this space, perhaps?