Quotes About Strategy

There is no long-term strategy for the brand. The following questions about the brand environment five or ten years into thefuture are unanswered, and may have not been addressed: What associations should the brand have? In what product classes shouldthe brand be competing? What mental image should the brand stimulate in the future?

Without any clear product difference, Lever could not dislodge Ivory, and ultimately withdrew from the market.

Unlike brand-building activities, most sales promotions are easily copied. In fact, competitors must retaliate or suffer unacceptable losses.

Managing with a long-term perspective is difficult in the face of the shareholder value emphasis, and other pressures, facing U.S. managers.

we need to find measures of long-term performance to supplement or replace short-term financials, measures that will be convincing enough to satisfy shareholders.

What a business does (the way it competes and where it chooses to do so) usually is easily imitated. It is more difficult to respond to what a business is, since that involves acquiring or neutralizing specialized assets or skills. Anyone can decide to distribute cereal or detergent through supermarkets, but few have the clout to do it as effectively as, say, General Mills.

There is no person in the firm who is really charged with protecting the brand equity. Those nominally in charge of the brand,perhaps termed brand managers or product marketing managers, are in fact evaluated on the basis of short-term measures.

Most firms will focus efforts upon one brand, protecting its position by pursuing a given positioning strategy. New segments are usually therefore uncovered by competitors who are attempting to gain a position in the market.

P&G is known on Wall Street as a firm which takes a long-term view of its brand profitability.

A borrowed signature story can also come from news accounts, historical events, biographies, novels, fables, TV shows or movies. Whatever the source, the stories must communicate the strategic message in an intriguing, involving and authentic way.

This book shows how to apply the power of storytelling to strategic messaging in the age of social media.

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. —Henri Bergson

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. —Jonathan Kozol

You've got to think about the big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction. —Alvin Toffler

smart people work, elegant people have smart people work for them. Gallin

when she contemplated the world situation she was aware that her mind would expand and become vast in three dimensions, and she could think years ahead, contemplating hundreds of moves as though she were observing a gigantic, global chessboard. When she planned, she planned sometimes decades in advance.

If you live among wolves you have to act like a Wolf" – Nikita Khrushchev

That is not how you do it. Think about all your problems at the same time, you might as well cut your veins and climb in the bath. You'll just be completely overwhelmed. We take one problem at a time.

I'd rather have one concrete plan and refine it by running through it over and over than try to have multiple plans and run the risk of confusing parts of them when it comes down to the wire.

The point of a plan was to let you know where you're going, and fool you into believing you know how you are going to get there.

So, on the day after we lost Ted Kennedy's seat, when everyone in town was reading last rites over our health care bill, Obama began plotting the miracle of its resurrection.

campaign in poetry and govern in prose"—and

keep your nest egg growing faster than inflation isn't all that hard.

Many people] plunge into all sorts of detail about what they want to accomplish, what investment they should buy, and where they want to be, without fist making sure they know where they stand now.