business strategy

Given all the new media options and technology capabilities today, it’s easy to forget the essential truths about brands. I read several reminders this past month about getting back to brand basics.

I know I’m dim, and I know that customers suffer glitches with every tech brand so my complaint isn’t news. But I want to explore it in the broader scheme of brand integrity and business strategy.

This is an argument that will not go away anytime soon. I have had heated debate in our b-school days way back. The question goes back to the core of the modern corporation. What role does business plays in creating value in societies? Or the question should be more about the ‘how’? Among B-schools there are many different point of views on what is a modern corporation.

This is the view from my temporary office. I have received a lot of great feedback from my last post and I guess it is a popular subject. And there are many different point-of-views out there. I want to continue on the subject and this was written on my 18 hour transpacific flight while eating a stack of home made French toast because I can’t stand airline food.

A recent post from Booz & Company’s “Strategy + Business” introduced a new term: “backshoring” – an emerging trend of returning manufacturing from an offshore location to the home country (”The Case For Backshoring“). This is especially important for US business, which has been a very aggressive proponent of offshoring for the past decade. Why is this reversal happening? In short, the conditions that made outsourcing look so attractive have changed utterly:

Does where stuff gets made matter to consumers, and thus to brand identity?

I keep thinking that it does, and that it will play an ever-increasingly important role in purchase decisions. Reality hasn't quite caught up with my forecast.

Innovation takes many forms, but social innovation is least understood and today there are pressing needs and urge for the creation, adoption and diffusion of innovations. Innovation takes many forms such technological, organizational, product, service and business model etc. The term ‘social innovation’ has come into common parlance in recent years.

Just three minutes walking down Baker Street in London I saw signs of free offer eveywhere (see pictures). Is free the future? Or just a reflection of the current economy? It has been 4-5 years since Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail, first brought up the idea of the free economy. Technology is offering consumers better deals and enabling innovative business models that are reshaping economic theory. In this economy, free is definitely attractive to many consumers.

by: Idris Mootee

Whether we are talking about innovation, technology or public policy, we often come up with solutions that creating more problems than they are supposed to  solve. Given the enormous complexity and almost un-manageable challenges ahead, what do we need to do? What seems to make sense doesn’t do it anymore.

by: John Caddell