Strategically are you leading ahead of the curve of behind the curve?

For a Managing Director or Chief Executive Officer, knowing where your business sits within its market is an important first step in leading it to where it needs to be. Where you are today is the result of action taken years before. For leaders' determining where they want their business to be is about deciding where a business is best positioned to succeed within its market over the leaderships tenure. 

Strategic Brand Positioning

That conversation of where to be (and where not to be) requires careful consultation with the shareholders, and key stakeholders as well as the people within the business.  What are their aspirations for the business today and over what horizon?  If a business is a mid-market player within a sector then is everyone happy to stay there and defend their market position and market share, or do they want to move to somewhere else?  Pressure mounts as other players within the market accelerate their growth by moving to other areas of the market. Staying where you are needs to be defended, then the leadership team must be able to defend these strategic decisions.  

That desire to shift should be based not just on a simple aspiration, or the selection of a new MD / CEO to move the brand, but on key factors which will include growth potential within segments of that sector, short-term opportunity analysis of moving compared to staying where you are as well as long-term goals including profitability and sustainability over the a long-term strategic and team culture goals.

Leaders' Biggest Decision

Moving position is not about dropping what you currently do, unless that is redundant within the market, but more about where will the business will be over time. Deciding where make prioritisation of future investments and place resources, including your energy is how businesses naturally migrate. Dramatic events such as Covid where businesses have to overnight pivot their model is the most often need to make complete shifts. Traditional change models are often driven by macro market drivers, (PESTLE) factors most of which are driven in response to consumer demand, reflecting changing preferences or within markets by changing dynamics of a market. 

The big decision for an MD / CEO is where to go from where you are today. That decision starts by answering why where you are today not where you want or need to be tomorrow. For a new leadership team moving the company's position is the reason they have been brought in as shareholders are not happy with the current position in terms of profits, ROI or sustainability. Deciding where to go requires some deep sole searching as well as emerging market opportunities from existing key customers but also in where and what impact emerging trends will make on the business. Dealing with the conflicting pulls and pushes of advice as to where to go, requires detailed analysis and evidence building, so as not to be pulled from pillar to post in strategic thought.

  

Leading ahead of the curve, or behind the curve.

Moving a business requires a thought process of where is that business sitting today within its market. Is the business ahead or behind the curve? Is the first and most important question to answer.  The gulf between the two is a huge chasm, are you a brand leader or a sector follower. 

What is the curve?

The curve is where a company/brand sits within a market. Any and every market are structured around the technology levels within them. From cars to computers, fashion to furniture, to energy to engineering every sector has its own defined structure. The curve is how customers see a market, and how customers engage with brands along that curve. In effect the curve shows where customers are by their buying behaviour, what they will spend based upon their value perception of each brand. It's why Rolex and Tag Heuer can charge more than Swatch and Timex. Those ahead of the curve invest more in research and their product across their marketing mix than those behind the curve.

This understanding of a market is a strategic issue for leader's to assess, understand and determine where and how they position their company to develop their long-term success. Where to position a company for long-term success is fundamental to the business's success.  Where you sit within a market provides you with a place to defend and an according accessible market presence, it is easy to use an existing cash cow to sell more downstream, it is harder to reposition yourself upstream with a new product as the brand perception is outside comfort or competency  The danger of growing using just cash cows is that it naturally slips the brand down the curve, a dangerous precedent which is hard to stop or reverse. 

Strategic Curve Positioning

This structure, the normal distribution curve is a line along which every player in the market is mapped by perception as to where they sit. At the far left are the innovators, small technical product/service creators at the cutting edge of the market who develop bespoke new products. While there are always very few of these players (in a mature market) they are vital as the develop the new and innovative products and services the sector is known for. To do this they require the right mix of talent, creative space to succeed and deep pockets to support their innovation development. That makes them small players but with disproportionally  big brand presences and are often funding (owned or in Joint Ventures with main stream players).  

As the curve increases businesses are seen as early adopters, where higher growth companies sit who have developed sufficient market size to stand alone, and who quickly adopt ideas form innovators and take it to the mainstream market. for many people these flagship companies are what determines a market as they reflect the innovation but in a larger scale than then the pure innovators. Typically good at marketing and sales as well as product development these companies can premium price their products and services to the discerning customer who buys the pure value proposition that early adaptors offer.

Early majority companies, play in the mainstream, safe, established with a wider value proposition than the product they bring innovation in once proved. By being a mainstream player the brand USP and value proposition has to be clearer across the entire marketing mix and unlike the earlier sections a wider skillset of people are needed who can identify trends and develop them into the mass market position early on in which those companies operate. 

Late majority companies gather trends and repackage them with lower priced versions of that trend, but bring it to new audiences with enhanced convenience, more support and rely upon mass acceptance using a wide range of marketing mix techniques suitable to their sector.

At the tail end of any sector are the laggards, players in the market who hoover up trends that are now past, but have some lower price or new laggard customer segments who they can resell these products too. Laggard markets can be extremely successful where they extend lifespans of trends to keep them alive by repackaging them to wider, often high value alternative markets. 

Why being ahead of behind the curve matters

Where a new or existing customer, sits on its sector curve is a core strategic issue. A company must play it its competitive advantage, and shifting that takes time and resources to achieve.  The gulf between the front of the curve, the innovators compared to the laggards is huge. Players within the same sector but at significantly different market positions are almost speaking foreign languages to each other and certainly very different cultures.   

Innovator and early adopters will more heavily invested in new products and services while those behind the curve invest significantly less, sometimes very little in products and services.  This reflect sin visual differences in the relative prices they can charge for their comparable products and the timeline with which they bring bring their respective products to market.   

That investment in new products require high investment which is offset by higher profit margins to premium customers, while those further down the curve have to offset lower gross margins with lower costs in product development coupled with larger market segments increasing sales volume and therefore lower costs to come to market. Choosing where to sit 

Strategic Sustainability

Choosing where to position your company is therefore a vital strategic decision to take. The key criteria of a long-term strategic view is essential, where does the company want to compete over the next 5 years, not just to capitalise on next years' opportunity. It takes time, even in agile companies to orientate, become established and achieve positive ROI's and develop a sustainable position within a market.   

This means that strategic positioning defines a leadership's success or failure. Picking the right strategic position is the biggest single decision which a leadership team has to undertake, it will determine what your business future looks like, determining your business model through to defining your long-term success.

Getting your strategy right.

Strategic planning is the most reliable way to develop a sustainable and successful market position. Evaluating all options, stakeholder and shareholder needs aligned to the current and future market opportunities and risks. It also focuses leaders on setting their goals and aspirations in context with those key factors aligning the whole business with a focus and shared direction to take. 

For leaders to lead they must be going someone and that requires them to make the big decisions, but make them strategically not tactically.

Managing Strategic Risk

What is Strategic RISK

Many business leaders do not understand the strategic risks within their business. Risk analysis often focuses solely on management and operational risks but fail to mention or underestimate the likelihood to possible impact of strategic risk on their business. Strategic risks though are far more critical in the determining the success or failure of an enterprise.

When leaders think about risk management in business they are too often talking about legal compliance or about the operational risks around issues such as health and safety.  

Drawing up lots of rules and making sure that all employees follow them on the other hand can solve operational risk. Many such rules, of course, are sensible and do reduce some risks that could severely damage a company. But rules-based risk management focuses on legal requirements, not complete risk management. 

Management and operational risks have attracted leaders attention for obviously important reasons around safety and compliance, but the risks have become over prominent in leadership thinking about risk. This is a common misunderstanding of risk by leaders, not seeing risk as primarily a strategic issue in business. This view of risk misses the strategic elements of risk, which leaders need to actively consider in defining their business model and in making strategic decisions. From start-up to exit risk is a strategic issue, which should underpin all strategic thinking.  

Risk is an essential element of strategic thinking. Every business idea creates and must deal with strategic risks. When someone comes to me with an idea and their opening phase goes along the lines of "no-one has done this before, that's why it will succeed" immediately gets me thinking is there an obvious reason about why no-one has done this before? In the real world there are no natural vacuums. So why has no-one else done this before.   

Strategic risk must be the first risks which entrepreneurs, owners, leaders and stakeholders (the shareholders, NED's, advisors and accountants etc) need to identify and identify and scrutinise. Strategic risk defines the real opportunity a business has to succeed, as an entity or within any chosen opportunity it sets to undertake, from a new product or service through to entering a new market.

Risk v Opportunity

All opportunities carry a risk. The two elements are tangibly linked, there are no opportunities that do carry risk, and the direct link between the two means the greater the opportunity so the greater the risk.  Too few business leaders identify that clearly and develop a clear plan to deal with those strategic risks. In Dragon's Den the reason why the dragons often want so much of the shares for their investment is to deal with that risk. I the risk is low (clear market, clear routes to that market, experienced and viable leadership team and clear plans to get to market with an plausible exit strategy) then they fall over themselves (trample over each other) to make corresponding offers for a far smaller share of the pie. This is a simple example of the value of understanding strategic risk in setting up a new business. But this is what experienced consultants like myself assess when we strategically plan a business. 

As an independent experienced strategic planner identifying the strategic risks, profiling these and then assessing these risks is critical for leaders to understand and actively overcome in their strategic thinking.     

Developing leadership risk skills is an important element for leaders to understand that their approach to risk defines how the lead and what they lead. Strategic risk defines the type of business model that leaders develop through to which markets and where in them they choose to operate. 

Understanding strategic risk and learning to how to manage key business risks throughout your business is an important skill set for leaders to develop in establishing their judgment in risk considerations and ensure they are integrated into strategic thinking.  There are two parts to risk, firstly identifying your strategic risk and then secondly how to actively manage the identified risks, which this article covers. If you would like to know more about strategic business planning then click this link here.

Here are some key questions to consider in identifying strategic risk:  

1. Risk Appetite 

The first stage in managing risk is to look at the leadership team and its surrounding stakeholders, both formal (Board, NED, shareholders) and informal (employees, advisors, channel partners) to map out the appetite to risk. The leaderships' risk appetite determines the overall approach the business will take to risk. Risk is always directly linked to opportunity and therefore reward, take no risk and you take no reward. Conversely take high risks and you could achieve high rewards (think Amazon), but equally exposes the business to potential high failure. 

The more the leadership diversifies from its core skill sets so it increases the risk it is likely to face. This is why investors want to see both  the leadership teams track record but also their relevance to the market. Diversity in its self is also vitally important, too many people from within a narrow field often limits risk taking due to lack o wide and group think mentality. Leadership diversity increases risk, and lack of diversity reduces risk appetite.

Risk appetite is also directly correlated to the experience of the sector you are operating in, the more established and known the sector is to the leadership team has so the lower risk the leadership team sees in operating with in it. than emerging and unknown.       

2. How well is your strategy defined? 

Without a defined strategy your business is at high risk. If the leadership does not have a clear and articulated strategy, which is shared and owned, then the business is vulnerable to strategic drift, living in a dream without clarity and purpose. Having a strategy in place, provides the context of the business, with strategic goals, intent in positioning and outcomes defined which enable the business to drive forward. To learn more about strategy click here.

Inside a good strategic plan the strategic risk must be identified, clarified and clearly mitigated, with realistic, affordable and attainable mitigations in place.  A great strategy does not avoid risk but embraces it.  Many of the leading and successful businesses were begun by entrepreneurs who fully embraced strategic risks.   

3. Strategic Risk Analysis

A business strategy must define the risk environment within which it operates. Strategic risk starts by looking at the risks that exist within a market (and defining why and how you will succeed despite them) as we as the strategic risk in entering a market compared to the risk of not entering a market. Strategic risk management should compare not only the risks of the strategy but the reverse risks of not doing the strategy, the gap risk of missing the opportunity. Why are we going here not there is a classic question which I ask, and so often hear no coherent argument as an answer.

Strategic risk also covers risk analysis of the leadership and its approach to risk, how comfortable it is with risk reflects in how leadership teams actively manage risk which reflects its established risk skill set and appetite to risk across the board. How well can the senior team deal with risk, and to just ignore it, is an important element of risk analysis. 




4. Strategic Risk Assessment

Risk, any risk is defined by the potential impact of the consequences from it. The manifestation of its likelihood of occurring is the assessment which must be undertaken, this is often scrutinized by undertaking scenario analysis (driven by board, NED and expert support and advisors) will encourage the leadership to consider a range of scenarios that can result in significant adverse consequences for the business and assist the leadership to make sure full width and depth analysis of strategic risk is undertaken.

This assessment provides the basis of mapping the risk and determining the investment in mitigation required to reduce or remove that risk. Often risks are not seen across the business, the strategic risk assessment fails to understand that a company is a whole entity not just a product or service, so its IT, people, location and environment  are as vulnerable to strategic risk as is the market it operates within. Strategic risk is as (and often more) likely to occur within the infrastructure of a business as it is within a market. 

The other strategic risk assessment that is often under assessed (if at all) are global risks. The era of global issues from terrorist attacks, natural disasters or global pandemics are now part of strategic risk assessment.




5. Strategic Risk Mapping

The
leaders must see risk in the context of how shareholders or stakeholders measure value in the organization. This essential mapping of risk enables the leadership to articulate to stakeholders how the risks they are taking or the risks the business is exposed to may affect the organization’s ability to realize its strategic goals. By identifying common metrics for risk and performance also allows the leadership to define the priorities of risk management activities and focus on the mitigation of relevant and important and decision defining risks the board.

Defining Strategic Risk

The second step, in creating an effective strategic risk management system is to understand the qualitative distinctions among the types of risks that a business could face and determining how to actively manage those risk. Risks typically fall into one of three categories and here's how leaders should be managing them:

1. Managing: Strategic risks.

The leadership having determined the level of risk it is willing to take in order to generate the returns from its strategy, its risk and reward profile, leaders must then develop appropriate channel partners to achieve that strategy. From its bankers credit risk, its strategy of launching new products through to its channel partner selection, all these decisions impact upon the strategic risk strategy. 

Strategic risks are quite different from operational risks because they are not inherently undesirable; they are quite the reverse they are deliberately accepted as part of operating within that industry. A strategy with high returns requires the business to take on higher risks, and actively managing those risks is a key driver in achieving those potential gains.

Strategic risks cannot be managed through a rules-based control models, such as compliance to legislation. Instead, the leadership must install a risk-management system designed to reduce the probability that the assumed risks actually materialize and to improve the company’s ability to manage or contain the risk events should they occur. Such systems enable companies to take on higher-risk, higher-reward ventures by identifying drivers of strategic risk, most often these are identified through 5 Forces analysis within markets and systems usually include primary (and secondary fallback) detailed objectives which must be achieved which underpin the strategy to actively manage the strategic risks.    

2. Managing: External risk factors

Certain strategic risks arise from events outside the company and are beyond its influence or control, often identified through PESTLE analysis. These major macroeconomic risks are outside the market but directly influence it. PESTLE identification and analysis enable leaders to manage the external risks effectively, through proactive identification and mitigation of their impact. For example changing economic conditions may raise global interest rates, which put pressures on even successful businesses, which impacts upon costs and profits.

Businesses need to build a defined risk management processes to these different PESTLE categories. By identifying key drivers of external change leaders can devise stress testing through scenario planning and devise alternative strategic options should external risk factors come into play.

3. Managing: Preventable internal risks. 

Conversely internal risks, arising from within the organization, that are controllable and ought to be eliminated or avoided. Businesses should have well defined internal risk systems in place which includes a tolerance level, such as 95% of all calls must be answered within 3 calls, in other areas health and safety for example mandatory 100% requirements for the use of PPE and operating systems must always be in place.  

Businesses should seek to eliminate these risks since they get no strategic benefits from taking them on. This risk category is managed through active prevention by monitoring operational processes and guiding people’s behaviors and decisions toward desired norms.

Identifying and managing preventable risks is about good management of existing best practices within the legal and industry best practice.  Companies cannot anticipate every circumstance or conflict of interest that an employee might encounter, so ensuring that risk is talked about, reviewed and assessed against best practice. 

Managing Risk effectively

Risk is a difficult subject for leaders, precisely because it is seen as an operational detail rather than strategic in nature. Business planning sets over optimistic forecasts, from unrealistic timescales to launch new products and services through over inflated revenue streams.  This form of linear extrapolations, how leaders have done it before will be immediately repeatable with something new is compounded by the use of conformation bias, selectively picking supportive data and ignoring unsupportive data. This form of groupthink often limits the risk discussion by narrowing the discussion down to it will happen rather than taking a holistic approach to risk.

Other key drivers of strategic risk failure come from leaders ignoring industry activity, how fast and quickly competitors will react to any new strategic initiatives to minimize their impact upon the status quo and how channel partners and customers will sound supportive but will measure the risk to them and mitigate it by limiting their exposure to risk. How industries react to change is one important consideration from an effective 5 forces analysis of any market. How do they players react to change is often analyzed by war-gaming with scenarios played out in theoretical games to see the impact of industry competition.

By strategy mapping your business leaders can often assess all risks linked to objective setting, looking at risk events associated with each objective and generate a risk profile for each risk and associated mitigation strategy.

Recently the adoption of the balanced scorecard has become a major way of mitigating risk, by linking mitigation to performance driver indicators of behavior within the organization. This highly effective risk management tool enables companies to engineer risk out of departments through positive mitigation strategies.  

For areas of risk which cannot be mitigated from within the company, such as natural disasters or acts of terrorism, then developing contingency plans act as mitigation to unforeseeable external risks. Not putting all leaders on the same plane is a simple example of contingency planning as is having secondary operational site, should your primary site be unusable from either natural causes such as flooding or from acts of terrorism.

Like to know more about strategic business planning then learn more through my video course on strategic business planning, which will reduce your risk in succeeding within your market, then click this link.

Good leaders embrace risk, they do not avoid it and investing time and skills into understanding and actively managing risk is an important element of leadership.  Good strategic planning encompasses strategic risk assessment and leadership teams need to invest in understanding their risk if they wish to succeed in their market.  

Content Strategy: The future of marketing

The future of marketing is all about inbound marketing: Content strategy

If you can see a trend you have missed it!

In a world of continual change seeing what is happening is often difficult to understand until the paradigm shift has occurred. Many companies are struggling to stay ahead or even in the game of online marketing. Many companies are moving towards online marketing content strategy or as marketing people call it inbound marketing. This major shift in culture and one needs to be fully understood.  

  

I have just had an old-fashioned marketing communication from a well-known brand, asking me to make an immediate purchase offering me a FREE upgrade for a new phone, my automatic response is not to be interested, at all because they have not demonstrated that they understand my specific needs. That made me thinks and write this article to explain why in today’s online world that old marketing technique is now as un-effective as a double glazing salesman offering me 50% off!

It’s a complete shift not just an add-on

In a world where everyone is online all the time, the amount of information is drowning people, from Linkedin to Facebook and Twitter the rise of smart phone connectivity has promised much change to marketing but until recently only early adopters, high value and niche players could see what it meant to the marketing process.

Like many changes, it is not until the change becomes tangible does its impact become visual to many marketing departments that enables them to successfully influence a company’s marketing policy. This is considerably harder to convey when there is no tangible evidence of marketing results attributable to hard to track invisible marketing shift. Unlike the shift to direct marketing where direct connectivity between outcome and result can be seen through a transparent return on investment, online inbound marketing is struggling to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Pace is outstripping understanding

Currently content marketing relies heavily upon invisible and poorly understood online activities. Simply put, the rate of change is outstripping the knowledge base of the marketing industry, creating a gap between the understandings of marketing by decision makers. The routes causes of this is that not only are customers sourcing information in newer ways but the platform they are using, the Internet indexing is also changing ever faster, Goggle will make over 600 changes to way it scores content. Rapidly changing customer preferences, coupled with changing technologies and an ever changing platform results in the lack of certainty of what is working and why. By the time you’ve worked out what works it has already changed.

That speed is creating problems for social media to be able to convert this rate of change to make money. This continual change, both step and continual upgrading, makes it difficult for the industry to understand how to build sustainable pipelines of business.

Content Strategy also creates confusion.   

Content strategy marketing process, one that now focuses on creating online and open platform engagement, online PULL; rather than internally controlled PUSH marketing methods, traditional marketers often struggle to understand the process let alone feel uncomfortable with the concept. This is not unreasonable, given the history of marketing in the last 50 years has always focused on the traditional pipeline of generating and then controlling customer decision-making, content marketing turns that on its head. People investing in inbound marketing are asked to spend money on losing control of the potential customer by letting them make an open decision about how and when they engage with your brand. 

In the mid 1990’s I remember designing a website to support a brand. No one was interested until it was live and people could see something online. A director then said, “That’s great let’s print it off and send it to all our customers”               

Dialogue NOT monologue

The inbound marketing process is about generating an open dialogue, rather than a structured marketing process. It lets potentials, prospects and suspects move in and out of your control while they select you, rather than being controlled by you.

The Content Strategy Process

1. Listening – Online is now the first port of call for 78% of web users.   
2. Creating – Great content that answers need and demonstrates expertise.
3. Engaging – Is about being talked about and developing a dialogue with audiences
4. Transforming – Is about continual engagement, moving them from suspects to purchasers
5. Growing – Requires creating perpetual momentum developing new and developing loyalty

Source: www.tomorrow-people.com

Traditional marketing models of developing engagement such as AIDA are still highly valid but instead of just focusing on a immediate winning proposition through a grabbing hook, attach a liner and sink them in a simple linear model for winning customers. Content strategy marketing demands  multiple engagement tools which include cross referencing other parties creating competitive collaborative working to generate awareness, giving away FREE content in white papers coupled with fast and slow acquisition tools in decision making.

The strategy needs to be explained better

Moving to a content strategy is about moving from PUSH to PULL, not about the Internet platform, it is about understanding the importance of open unrestricted dialogue rather than material generation and in reality it is not just about the Internet although this is where its impact is being seen today, but equally will encompass every marketing platform and process. The growth of mobile technology will further the pace and realisation of content strategy.    

Like to learn more? Then see article What is Content Marketing or contact us at Cowden Consulting or see our website or social media channels for more about Cowden Consulting:-

Richard Gourlay Website - Linked in - Twitter - Facebook - Blog

Richard Gourlay services: business planning, strategic planning, business development, strategic marketing, Return on Investment, director development, director mentoring.

Cowden is an independent consultancy based in Dumfries and Galloway and works with businesses throughout the UK.

Posted by Richard Gourlay

Labels: brand strategy, content strategy, inbound marketing, marketing strategy, mobile strategy, online strategy, pull strategy, push strategy, strategic planning, strategy, Dumfries and Galloway Scotland

Growth Opportunities for 2012

Despite the doom and gloom merchants who seem to be surrounding us today about where the economy is going and for how long we will have to live in recession there are still may areas of growth. Not everyone and everything is in recession. So I thought I would share a few strategic thoughts as to where I see growth in 2012.

In every market their are always growth opportunities, even if it is just for insolvency practitioners, accountants and journalists! But, ignoring these sectors where is real growth coming from? It does not take long before you can see that if you want to look for growth, you just need to look beyond the news headlines.


Headlines Aren't Real

Headlines tell (and continuously repeat) what's happening as an average across the entire economy, so slow growth coupled with a reduction of public sector spending means that slow adapting traditional companies will be feeling the pinch, particularly if their growth has disproportionately come from public sector spending. The key reason why headlines aren't real is that they only really report bad news (apart from that final ahhh... story) put in for the human touch element.  Bad news sells and grabs headlines, while success never gets a mention. 

Headlines only show averages and I've never met anyone who is average. No-one is ever average and so no business is ever average. So when looking for growth and success turn off the TV, radio and throw away the newspaper and on line news and start by looking at what's happening in the real economy.

Retailing

The high street is dead according to the every expert with up shops empty or closed and yet people still shop in ever increasing numbers and we are building more of them than ever before. Go tell companies like Apple, John Lewis or any of the major supermarket chains about the collapse of retail and they will laugh out loud at you. Retail is not dead, it is just changing and changing faster than many retailers can adapt.

Twenty years ago I worked with retailers advising them to add more value by making their stores more consumer friendly with information and better zoned retailing layouts. Today, retailers need to be adapting to embrace a web active consumers, bricks with clicks stores like John Lewis who will have grown their online e-commerce business to be around 20% of their business integrating it with their modern well designed retail estate. To ignore online in many sectors is like King Canute trying to hold back the tide, but working with it you can appeal to many customer groups by using online an integral part of the retail experience.            
Successful retailers are providing modern inviting retail spaces with mixed offerings of retail and consumption are doing well, particularly as part of larger venues. Strategically the big are getting bigger and the others must look to diversify. The number of retail environments is increasing, with many others planned.  The changing nature of our retail environment to larger integrated retail centres which is the key driver of change as consumers move from convenience shopping to shopping as an experience event, 2012 will see that strategic shift accelerate, Click here to see local data company You tube explanation for more details.   

Consumer

Knowing where the consumer is going in 2012 is vital for success for many UK businesses. Consumers are buying more and more high quality items. Luxury top-end brands are growing fast and the UK has several strengths to capitalise on, companies like the revitalised TATA Jaguar / Land Rover Group of top end vehicles has never been stronger, both at home and abroad. Land Rover's new Evoque for example had a pro-order of 27,000 vehicles, and both companies are investing in new plant and new models.

This changing shift in purchasing behaviour opens business opportunities for forward thinking business owners to look at higher value consumption, top-end brands are growing globally at over 20% with our ability to design great products is a great strength, from fashion to architecture we are world class and the opportunities for growth are significant.

 The Green Market
The green agenda is also a huge growth market in the UK, and its not just solar panels, although this is a great success and one which will survive the Governments ill-judged slashing of the Feed In Tariff (FIT). peopel buying green products and ethical, traditional and home made sre all opportunities for 2012.

The Green agenda, being promoted long-term through the Green Deal, where not only green products are going but also where huge growth for the home improvement market will come from in 2012, supported by new financial channels opening up to fund these domestic sector.

If you would like to learn more about consumer growth trends then here is a good source of of trends for 2012 at trend watching.

Mobile Markets 
The growth of SMART mobile phones is now a major emerging market, this growth currently 650 million in use set to grow to 1.3billion by 2016 provides a whole new market to exploit.

As the world goes mobile so whole new markets are emerging, from gambling to live offers and app building mobile customers are one huge growth market which smart companies are getting into.   

Exporting

Exporting, that old business strategy chestnut is always a mythical panacea for any struggling economy and a favourite for politicians looking for a quick solution to any problem.

Exporting though is not a catch-all, for example exporting to Greece may not be the best idea in the near future, but to elsewhere provides an excellent opportunity for UK business to exploit. BRIC countries, (Brazil, Russia, India and China) provide excellent opportunities for growth. These countries are developing huge new middle classes looking for the type of products which we design, make and retail.

Companies such as Paul Smith have demonstrated an excellent business strategy of balancing their business model with the classic third, third, third split of income which is up £20 million to £196 million this year evenly split across UK, EU and rest of world (ROW). By balancing their income streams they have driven their profits to £24 million this year.

Don't be frightened of looking at export markets as a strategy, we are an excellent exporting nation, people love British products, from cutting edge technology to fashion through to our heritage and education and you should be looking at these opportunities in 2012.       

  

Growth in the Middle East


The middle East is a new emerging market as it redefines itself after the impact of the Arab Spring in 2011. Companies such as Coca-Cola which is currently investing nearly $1 billion in the Middle East, click here for article. With oil becoming even more important supported with stable high prices, countries such as MENA (Middle East and North Africa) provide growth opportunities for UK companies. Their growing populations of young well educated and online connected middle classes (Face book and Twitter created and sustained the Arab Spring) these are sensible markets for many businesses to look at moving into.   

Why Strategic Planning Works

There are many sectors of the UK economy which are doing quite well and some are doing better than ever. The companies doing well in our economy demonstrate good strategic planning and are set-up to succeed. They can respond faster to changes and take advantage of changes to and within their markets. For 2012 their are going to be winners and losers as always.

The evidence is that those with a plan to succeed will do better than those without. Those who have a clear well defined strategic plan focused on where they want to go and with a plan to get them there will be more successful than those who wing it. 

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