According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), marketing is defined as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” As I read this definition the word value stands out to me. Adding value is key to effective marketing, yet why is it that we seem to forget that fact in our everyday work life?
What is Crowdsourcing? For those of us who operate in the world of sourcing and supply chain, it sounds familiar but may not have anything to do with sourcing or supply chain at all. If you’re not familiar with the term, it is, as defined in Wikipedia, “the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a “crowd”), through an open call.”
Multi-step models for managing change have been adopted by most companies today. Still, teams struggle to lead their initiatives in a way that falls into the “30% that succeed” and even when projects are “complete” and progress more effectively than in the company’s past efforts, the company fails to realize the intended benefits. One quick way to identify where things fell short is to examine where time and effort were allocated throughout the execution of the change process.
It doesn’t matter how you define value. That definition is actually worth a bucket of crap (I missed that one). But I digress and will come back to that question later. Let me address the other part of my title first by asking you a hypothetical question.
Since this is the beginning of a long holiday weekend, we thought we would delay our really serious blog post that we had planned (Feces!! Dookie!! Scheisse!! How Do You Define Value?) and send you something humorous.