Monday, November 13, 2006
It's All in the Distribution Sauce
Jack Welch once said that Strategy is 'All in the Sauce'.(Jack Welch, Winning 2005)
Well, the thing is that for most organisations, their strategy has revolved around brand management to date. Now that is changing. With differentiation harder to achieve and mass advertising harder to make effective in terms of a brand message, the dominant players are becoming distribution led.
Take for example Coke. Microsoft. Google. It doesn't necessarily figure that they have the best products, just that they have strong distribution and have become the network choice through distribution (or should we say thru).
The thing is that panels are the same in many ways. It is increasingly difficult to make and then communicate a point of difference (not to say that they don't exist it is just hard to make people listen and then to care and act upon that). So the panels that 'win' are those that have the strongest distribution - read claimed size, scope. Can you get the job done? Of course in reality there is more to panels than this superficial network, but there is more to Coke than distribution as well! When they tried to change the formula slightly many people would not accept it so there are product attributes there as well.
So we need to embrace the new sauce just as we embrace HP sauce on our Bacon...
Well, the thing is that for most organisations, their strategy has revolved around brand management to date. Now that is changing. With differentiation harder to achieve and mass advertising harder to make effective in terms of a brand message, the dominant players are becoming distribution led.
Take for example Coke. Microsoft. Google. It doesn't necessarily figure that they have the best products, just that they have strong distribution and have become the network choice through distribution (or should we say thru).
The thing is that panels are the same in many ways. It is increasingly difficult to make and then communicate a point of difference (not to say that they don't exist it is just hard to make people listen and then to care and act upon that). So the panels that 'win' are those that have the strongest distribution - read claimed size, scope. Can you get the job done? Of course in reality there is more to panels than this superficial network, but there is more to Coke than distribution as well! When they tried to change the formula slightly many people would not accept it so there are product attributes there as well.
So we need to embrace the new sauce just as we embrace HP sauce on our Bacon...
