A few years ago, I was one of the plenary speakers of the Philippine Center for Entrepreneurship’s Go Negosyo Youth Summit. Let me share the five highlights of my talk on “Grow from Failures” where I talked about many business failures from my early days, some of which I also wrote in my book “The WE Entrepreneur”. 1. I was 23 years […]
Search Results for: Marketing Strategy
Q1: You became the first Asian President of the World Marketing Association a few years ago and you have made Asia proud. How has the role of marketing in the Asian region then and now evolved at an international level? In the last decade, we can see that the role of marketing is evolving so rapidly in the Asia. In […]
Author / co-author of 16 bestselling marketing books Contemporary Marketing Strategy in the Philippine Setting (1992) Marketing Mix Strategy in the Philippine Setting (1993) The Marketing Mentors (1993) Marketing 101: An A to Z Guide (1994) Marketing Plan: Building The Profitable Preferred Brand (1997 & 2012 2nd edition) Marketing Excellence in Good Times and Bad (1998, co-edited with Dr. Ned […]
Author’s Note: This is an expanded version of last Friday’s article on the value proposition as a contract for relevance. When companies fail to deliver on their value proposition, the usual explanation is poor execution. Sales overpromised. Operations underdelivered. Customer service failed to manage expectations. Sometimes that is true. But when the same failures repeat across markets, teams, and leadership cycles, […]
Author’s Note: This is Step 1 of a 6-step Logic chain based on the PILA reasoning stack—Problem, Insight, Logic, and Assumptions. Most organizations misclassify what a value proposition is. They treat it as messaging, positioning, or branding clarity. A communication asset owned by marketing and expressed through differentiation language. This is a category error. A value proposition is not what […]
In strategy, activity is often mistaken for progress. Organizations move quickly to solutions because “doing something” feels productive. However, in the PILA (Problem, Insight, Logic, Assumptions) reasoning stack, the Problem is your structural foundation. If the “P” is weak, the entire stack—the forced insights, the fragile logic, and the risky assumptions—becomes an organizational liability. Solving the wrong problem well is […]
Data is one of the most overvalued commodities in modern business. We are currently drowning in statistics, yet many organizations are starving for Insight. Data tells you whathappened; observation tells you how it happened. But only an insight tells you why it happened in a way that allows you to transform the future. To find it, one must move beyond […]
Strategy does not fail in execution first. It fails in logic. What usually happens is this: teams build something that looks coherent on paper, defensible in meetings, and impressive in presentations, only to discover later that coherence is not the same as structural validity. At that point, execution is no longer strategy. It is recovery. And recovery is always more […]
After more than 30 years of advising business owners, leadership teams, and organizations, one pattern remains remarkably consistent: strategies rarely fail because of execution. We like to blame execution because it is a visible, actionable scapegoat. It suggests the team simply lacked the “hustle” or the incentives weren’t sharp enough. But the truth is more structural. Strategies fail because of […]
For decades, Tang has dominated the powdered beverage category in the Philippines. Leadership, however, does not guarantee immunity from change. Markets evolve. Consumers evolve. Categories fragment. I sat down with Mondelēz International in the Philippines’ Managing Director Aleli Arcilla, recently conferred an honorary Mansmith Sales Masters Award, to discuss Tang’s strategic reset for 2026. Q1: Let me begin with an […]