Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short Direct competitors sell the same kind of product to the same customers for the same need, such as McDonald’s and Burger King. Indirect competitors sell something different that meets the same need, such as a supermarket ready meal or a meal kit for a hungry customer. […]
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short Consultative selling is a sales approach in which the seller acts as an adviser: they diagnose the buyer’s problem first, then recommend a solution, which may or may not be their own product. The term is associated with Mack Hanan, whose book Consultative Selling was first
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short Competitive intelligence is the legal and ethical collection and analysis of information about competitors, customers and the wider market, turned into decisions. Its analytical roots are in Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy (1980), which set out techniques for analysing industries and competitors. It differs from industrial espionage:
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short A virtuous cycle is a chain of events in which each good result feeds the next, so growth reinforces itself; its mirror image is a vicious cycle. In business the idea is usually called a flywheel, a term popularised by Jim Collins in Good to Great.
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short A geographic organizational structure (also called a territorial, regional or area structure) groups a company’s operations into units by place, such as countries or regions, each with its own leader and profit responsibility, under a corporate centre that keeps strategy, finance and the brand. It is
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short Direct-to-consumer (D2C or DTC) is a business model in which a brand sells to end customers through channels it controls, such as its own website, app or stores, instead of through wholesalers and retailers. The brand gives up the retailer’s reach in exchange for the customer
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short Key Partners (the book’s term is Key Partnerships) is the building block of the Business Model Canvas that describes the network of suppliers and partners that make a business model work. Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur set it out in Business Model Generation (2010), distinguishing four
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short Starbucks’ mission, as stated on its careers site and UK website in 2026, is “to be the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world, inspiring and nurturing the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” The sentence pairs
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) means stating your conclusion, recommendation or request at the very start of a message, then giving the supporting detail. It comes from US military writing: the Air Force’s Tongue and Quill handbook tells writers to “get your bottom line up front
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short A communication strategy framework is a written plan for who an organisation needs to reach, what it needs them to understand or do, and how it will get the message there and check that it worked. It typically covers purpose, objectives, audiences, messages, channels and measurement.
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short A BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, pronounced “bee-hag”) is a long-term goal so bold and clear that it needs little explanation and pulls an organisation forward. The idea comes from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, whose research for Built to Last found more evidence of BHAGs
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short Vertical integration means a firm owns more than one successive stage of the chain that makes and delivers its product, instead of buying those stages from other companies. Economist Ronald Coase (1937) asked why firms make some things in-house at all, and Oliver Williamson explained the
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short Cost leadership is a competitive strategy in which a firm aims to be the lowest-cost producer in its industry while serving a broad market, so it can match rivals on price and still earn a margin, or undercut them. It is one of the three generic
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short A conceptual model is a plain, technology-free picture of a domain: the things that matter (entities), their attributes, the relationships between them and the rules they follow. In information systems, Wand and Weber (2002) describe conceptual modeling as building a representation of selected phenomena in a
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short A STEEP analysis maps the forces outside an organisation that can change its prospects, in five groups: Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental and Political. It belongs to a family of environmental-scanning acronyms with PEST, PESTEL and STEEPLE, whose roots are usually traced to Francis Aguilar‘s 1967 book
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short Growth hacking is a process of rapid, cross-functional experimentation across the whole funnel, from acquisition to retention, aimed at finding scalable ways to grow. Marketer Sean Ellis popularised the term in a July 2010 post, “Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup”, describing a growth hacker
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short The Minto Pyramid Principle is a method for business writing: start with the answer, then group the supporting ideas beneath it in a logical pyramid, so the reader gets the main point first and the reasons after. It was developed by Barbara Minto, a Harvard Business
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short The BCG matrix (growth-share matrix) sorts a company’s businesses by market growth and relative market share into four groups: Stars, Cash Cows, Question Marks and Dogs. Most accounts, including BCG’s own, date it to 1970, when founder Bruce Henderson published “The Product Portfolio” in BCG Perspectives;
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short The 3C model is Kenichi Ohmae’s strategic triangle: a strategy has to fit three players at once, the Customer, the Competitor and the Company. Ohmae, a Japanese strategist, set it out in The Mind of the Strategist, published in English by McGraw-Hill in 1982, arguing that
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Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today In short Bootstrapping means building a company with the founders’ own money and the cash its customers pay, instead of outside investors. The name comes from the phrase “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”. It trades speed for control: growth is limited by cash flow, but the founders
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