I’ve developed many different campaigns for a wide variety of clients in many different business categories. In the process I’ve come across a handful of practices that seem to separate the category winners from their competitors.

If you think you’ve got the best product or service and want to go global, here are some mission critical marketing strategies and tactics that need to become integral to your operations.

#1: Leading Brands March to their Own Drum

If you’re not marching to the beat of your own drum, you’re a follower, not a leader. It’s that simple. Leaders [can't help but] think differently and seize upon the opportunities they find along their chosen path. The products and services they offer are a tangible response to the problems or opportunities they've discovered. Leaders are aware of what their competitors are doing, the competitive activity (or lack of it). It helps define their pace and timing, helping them decide when and where to strike out in a new directions.

Product Managers are followers. They “compete” for established trade routes with “bigger”, “better”, “faster” or “cheaper” marketing solutions and advertising campaigns.

Leaders don’t talk price unless they’re in the discount business, or forced to.

Price is what you talk about when you have nothing else left to say.

Talking money trains customers and prospects to think about getting the best price, not the best value, let alone the best product. Price is not an advantage; for most brands it's their Achilles heel.

Leaders hunt relentlessly for meaningful ways to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Leaders defend their territory with multiple brand advantages that, in the consumer’s mind, represent a mental, physical or spiritual advantage. 

Leaders reinvent themselves and the brands they serve on an ongoing basis because change is the constant.

#2: Leaders Understand, Respect and then Redefine the Economic Terrain

Many leaders come across as adversarial because they’re not “team players”.

Guess why?

They’re not.

They’re team-leaders. 

Leadership is needed to create a brand. Concensus management to sustain it.

Leaders get clear vision[s] by doing a lot of homework (also called research) to help them understand the economic terrain. When they have enough data, the terrain looks like a geological map that defines, in three dimensions, area’s of business strength, weakness, opportunity and threat.

Leaders surround themselves with insightful stakeholders that help them define a business model that maximizes opportunity and minimizes stakeholder investment risk.

Solid values ensure that all customer-facing team members handle opportunity and adversity in the same predictable and prescribed manner – buying management time to decide if an alternate course of action is warranted or ill-advised.

#3: Leaders Create or Manage Brands that Serve Tomorrow, not Yesterday

Leaders reinvent themselves and the brands regularly because change is their constant. Their experience is made up of a host of successes and failures that help them define the frequency and the odds of success and failure for everything in the production, marketing and communications mix.

Past wins fund tomorrow’s research.
Past losses are write-offs. Little more.

#4: Leaders Understand that Audience Segmentation is Mission Critical

Leaders analyze their sales using metrics that are congruent with their brands' missions, visions and values. They define their [ideal] target groups as those customers who enable them to achieve their stated brand goals.

1. They build segmented databases featuring primary and secondary clients, prospects and suspects.
2. They take care of key accounts themselves – because having skin in the game matters.
3. They assign dedicated account managers to their high volume \ high value clients.
4. E-marketing allows them to stay in touch with (secondary) clients, prospects and suspects in transition.
5. Their supports build and refine suspect databases that turn suspects into prospects.
6. They re-market to increase product and service conversion rates.
7. They use both online and offline advertising to move new suspects through the marketing funnel.

#5: Leaders Partner People, Products and Services

Leaders segment their products and services along one line, their audience along another line and media alternatives along a third line to ensure the right product is presented to the right audience using the right medium. They take pride in their ability to create opportunities for their brands, customers and prospects to meet.

#6: Leaders Stay Out of the Trenches (most of the time)

While leaders do not underestimate the importance of re-winning their customer’s loyalty with every transaction, they do understand that the game is lost if they lose perspective. Leaders enter trenches to reacquaint themselves with day-to-day issues and keep in touch with key accounts, but leaders keep on moving because they need to keep one eye on and remain one step ahead of the competition.

In today’s fast paced world, leaders and their key supports use business, personal and social sites to market their product and services, monitor the competition, communicate and survey their audiences… all in real time.

Their online media sites are like familiar beacons that serve them well 24/7.

Because they march to their own drum, they have far more genuine news and views to share and have more interesting stories to tell (to their followers).

Leaders tell the world who they are, what they’re up to and what sets them apart from others.

They network with like-minded brands and people.

And in time more and more followers follow.

I love the way each ad in this new series for Rolex makes the individual part, not the watch, or the celebrity wrist, or the situation the hero, enabling Rolex to expound on a wide array of genuine USP's.

As seen in The Toronto Globe & Mail, 9-28-2024

As seen in The ROB Magazine, 9-28-2024

I’ve been blogging since 2008 –  I used to do so once a week to build up my online profile. Now I post about once a month. My tracking data suggest that I have a small, loyal, unsolicited following that's about the same size as my LinkedIn network. I could conclude that there's no direct, or obvious, return on my blogging investment, and that it's a waste of time.

Q: so what’s the point if my blog is more like a personal diary than a published work?

A: practice, not popularity, makes the master.

On one of my dog-walking routes I pass by an old Chinese woman who does her Tai Chi routine alone and in silence every morning. No one greets her, interrupts her, or tells her that she’s doing great. She’s a study of meditation in motion. Graceful, focused and precise. She is a master immersed in her moment. 

Four to five times a week I swim in the local community center. I see two kinds of people:

• people who are about 40-50 years of age that to keep fit and are squeezing an energetic 1/2 hour swim into their hectic daily schedule.
• older asian women. About 60-75 years of age. Like the Tai Chi Master, I see on my morning walks, these women are also inspirational examples of meditation in motion. They swim with grace, pace and intention. 

I used to confuse many of those I worked with by appearing to have a solid answer for every communications problem that they brought to me to sort out. They’ll know as much as I did - and more - if they stick with it for 40 years. A few will, most won't. 

Blogging is a mental exercise that I (continue to) use to hone my communication skills.

It forces me to think clearly and succinctly, and it affects everything else that I do. 

The masters I see in the park and in the pool encourage me to become a master as well. And to trust my heart and follow it down new, unknown paths.

Brand Equity is everything. Great R&D, production, marketing, sales and service are all needed to bring a brand to life, and make it flourish for generations. Brands like AMEX, Ford, Maxwell House Coffee are intergenerational powerhouses – and they are the ones that stand the most to lose to AI fraud because when you get burned in a brand-scam, like ordering a case of Maxwell House Coffee for 50% off with your VISA card, you lose faith in human nature as well as Maxwell House Coffee and VISA.  

WHAT CAN YOU AS A ADVERTISING AND MARKETING PROFESSSIONAL DO TO MAKE THE BRANDS YOU SUPPORT MORE FRAUD PROOF.

Hint: less online sales are better.

Visa now employes artificial intelligence to reduce fraudulent transactions as scammers also take to AI.

"We look at over 500 different attributes around [each] transaction, we score that and we create a score – there's an AI model that can do that. We do about 300 billion transactions a year," said James Mirfin, global head of risk and identity solutions. 

Fraudsters use generative AI to make their scams more convincing than ever, leading to unprecedented losses for consumers, according to a Visa report.

The company prevented $40 billion in fraudulent activity from October 2022 to September 2023 - nearly double the fraudulent amount prevented in the previous year.

Scammers use AI to generate primary account numbers [PAN] and test them consistently. The PAN is a card identifier, usually 16 digits long, but it can be up to 19 digits in some instances. 

Using AI bots, criminals repeatedly attempt to submit online transactions through a combination of primary account numbers, card verification values (CVV) and expiration dates until they get an approval response. This method, known as an enumeration attack, leads to $1.1 billion in fraud losses annually, comprising a significant share of overall global losses due to fraud, according to Visa.

To reduce the number of fraudulent transactions VISA looks at over 500 different attributes around each transaction. The transaction is then scored, and we create a score for it. Each transaction is assigned a real-time risk score that helps detect and prevent more enumeration attacks in transactions where a purchase is processed remotely without a physical card via a card reader or terminal.

Because we’re looking at a wide range of different attributes and we're evaluating every single transaction, we see new types of fraud emerging – and our model will see them and will catch them. Our AI model scores those transactions as high risk – allowing our customers to decide not to approve those transactions."

In the last five years, the firm has invested $10 billion in technology that helps reduce fraud and increase network security.

Generative AI enables fraud

Cybercriminals are turning to generative AI and other emerging technologies including voice cloning and deepfakes to scam people, Mirfin warned.

• Romance scams
• Investment scams
• “Pig butchering” – a scam tactic in which criminals build relationships with victims before convincing them to put their money into fake cryptocurrency trading or investment platforms.

In today’s global marketplace the criminals don’t sit in a market, pick up a phone and call someone. That’s far too labour intensive. They're using some level of artificial intelligence, whether it's a voice cloning, a deepfake video, or social engineering, they're using artificial intelligence to enact different types of fraud, Mirfin said. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT enable scammers to produce far more convincing phishing messages to dupe people.

With less than three seconds of audio, Cybercriminals can clone your voice, according to the U.S. based identity and access management company Okta. The voice clone can be used to trick your family members into thinking that you’re in trouble and need money, or trick banking employees into transferring funds out of your account.

Generative AI tools have also been exploited to create celebrity deepfakes to deceive fans, said Okta. Cybercriminals using generative AI to commit fraud can do it for a lot cheaper by targeting multiple victims at one time using the same or less resources, said Deloitte's Center for Financial Services in a report.

"Incidents like this will likely proliferate in the years ahead as bad actors find and deploy increasingly sophisticated, yet affordable, generative AI to defraud banks and their customers," the report said, estimating that generative AI could increase fraud losses to $40 billion in the U.S. by 2027, from $12.3 billion in 2023.

Earlier this year, an employee at a Hong Kong-based firm sent $25 million to a fraudster that had deep-faked his chief financial officer and instructed to make the transfer.

Chinese state media reported a similar case in Shanxi province this year where an employee was duped into transferring 1.86 million yuan ($262,000) to a fraudster who used a deepfake of her boss in a video call.