Our First Blog Post

by Jennifer H. Smith (CMSA)

As I’ve said before I’m on a mission to re-invigorate my company. I started by getting my website http://www.marketingmatters.co.za redesigned. It was a combined effort between myself and a great company called Web Guru. I was thrilled to realise that almost everything I’d written 12 years ago was still relevant to both my business, and I believe my clients today. I’d also wanted to write a blog explaining the philosophy behind my company and the website design, and saw that I’d done just that in my first blog post in 2011. (Digital was a completely different landscape at that time) So I’m re-blogging that blog now and I’ll continue to share my thoughts and ideas over the coming months. Let me know your thoughts. Click the read more button to follow through to my first blog post.

As this is our first blog post, I felt it appropriate to start with an introduction. The philosophy underpinning everything we do at Marketing Matters flows from my belief that empassioned marketing can only be effective if it is understood throughout the value chain. Each link in the chain from raw material suppliers through the various functions within the business, to the retail channels and finally the end user must somehow be engaged in the brand vision. Should this not occur, then discrepancies in behaviour between the vision and the delivery or experience of the brand start to surface, thereby jeopardizing the success of the brand/company.

matrix wind chimeYou may also wonder about the picturesque visuals of an eastern nature that appear on the website and this blog. These represent my belief that there are excellent strategy tools available to us that are derived from ancient Chinese teachings. The key books that I have studied over the years are Sun Tzu’s “Art of War”, and Musashi’s “Book of Five Rings”, and the IChing. These books contain teachings that have been guiding governments and major corporates for over 2500 years. We are lucky to have them available in a number of excellent translations, which make their wisdom accessible to our modern day strategy dilemmas.

The “Iching” is, more philosophical or symbolic in nature. This is an ancient tool of divination, which has also guided the actions of leaders throughout the ages. However for my purposes it symbolizes the manner in which strategists have to look at the signs of the times in order to chart a course into the future. The information we have available to us at any one time is incomplete and subject to interpretation based on our own sometimes narrow perspective. Strategists of great vision however are able to interpret the various signs from the economy, government, social and technological trends and create strategies for business that change the course of history. We just have to think of people like Henry Ford, Jack Welsh, Oppenheimer to name but a few.

In this blog we would like to share some of our thinking together with old & new Ideas. We would appreciate your feedback as to the usefulness of the content and any topics you would like us to address.

Pin It

Comments (0)

There are no comments posted here yet

Leave your comments

  1. Posting comment as a guest.
Attachments (0 / 3)
Share Your Location