It Is What You Do, Not The Way That You Do It.

I've written before about my belief that strategy and marketing are intimately intertwined, most notably in respect of defining who one's customers are likely to be. So, it was interesting to hear many of the entrepreneurs at a start-up competition get this wrong and define themselves as tech businesses.

Maybe influenced by two oft-cited UK success stories tech businesses that aren't actually tech busineses. They may use a lot of technology, but Moo is a printing company and Moshi Monsters is an entertainment company and they're both very sure of that.

Here's the reality. You're a tech busainess if you create technology that your customers use to do something else. If you simply use technology to produce your product/service, you're not a tech business you're a business that uses technology and there's nothing wrong with that.

Technology may be how you do what you do, but it doesn't mean it is what you do. And knowing what you do is key to knowing how to market yourself.

Authenticity.

"That's not to say there haven't been a few bumps along the way, like in 2007 where they had such a high demand for their product that Tran literally could not find enough of the right chlies to make the sauce. So he asked his customers to wait instead of using an inferior product, and wait they did."

How to build a business with a $60 million turnover.

When Everybody Zigs, It's Time To Zag.

A lot of people in the marketing and advertising world have been getting very excited about this one-off Guardian newspaper advertisement palying on Marmite's "Love it or Hate it" tagline.

Yes, it's nicely designed, but it's a nicely designed rendition of an old thought and a thought that had been everywhere in the days before this image appeared.

And while we know that individual ads don't shift the sales of newspapers, my other problem with it is that the last thing that would have made a newspaper appear distinctive this weekend was another analysis of Baroness Thatcher.

Far better to have focussed on promoting something completely different or (as Rob Campbell suggested to me) an ad guaranteeing there was no coverage of Thatcher in the issue.

As Kit Kat prove by linking their "Take a Break" trope to the concept of a No Wi_FI zone, distinctiveness can lie in doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing.