I was recently reminded of the five great questions management guru Peter Drucker created for his foundation’s work with non-profit organizations:
- What is our mission?
- Who is our customer?
- What does the customer value?
- What are our results?
- What is our plan?
With minor tweaks, they are equally as valuable for for-profit companies to answer for themselves. Here is how we recommend revising the questions for success in for-profit businesses.
What is our mission?
Don’t let this question get you contemplating having a mission statement. A mission statement does not a marketing strategy make. With a for-profit company, ask instead, what are the core principles by which the business operates? At the end of the day, what is most important to the company owners and/or management? What is the company culture? In order to be successful, a company’s brand — and therefore its marketing message — needs to be build on these fundamentals. …Read More
In an interview in the May 21, 2012 issue of Fortune, Fred Smith, founder and CEO of Fedex, talks about “reputational intelligence.” It is a concept they use in running the company because “…at the end of the day, we’re essentially selling trust,” he says. Amen to that!
I found more in an article entitled, “The Reputational Intelligence Reward,” written by William G. Margaritis, senior vice president of global communications and investor relations at FedEx, published April 28, 2010 on chiefexecutive.net. Great stuff, and the quotations below are excerpts from that article.
Brand vs. Reputation
At first, I was somewhat perturbed that they think of their reputation as separate from their brand. But then, Margaritis explained that in the research they had done, they found that people tend to view brand as what a company sells and reputation as what a company stands for. …Read More