Edgecraft

Edgecraft is a term which was first termed by Seth Godin, who has for a long time been a top clever bloke. It was a key part of his book 'Purple Cow' which was all about how your products, services and business had to be extraordinary to stand out from the crowd, particularly in the highly competitive digital landscape which we're all now part of. He was of course spot on, examining the edges of what you do enables you to identify areas of your business where you're going the extra mile to help a customer or solve a problem. Once you identify these areas you can bring them into your everyday business practice and improve what you do.

We adopted the practice to examine our own business to spark a change in the business focus and direction. The interesting spin off was that when we started examining the edges of our core business we realised that's where all our best client case studies were to be found. Projects that went the extra mile or were particularly innovative or interesting all sat on the edges of our core business. As we mapped our services we also uncovered keywords and phrases that we could use as bidding terms for pay-per-click adverts which would drive prospects to our landing pages.

We moved our marketing and communications program to support this repositioning of the business to nearer the cutting edge by promoting our case studies and thinking online through podcasts, client briefs and seminars. This process of "edgecraft" proved extremely useful as a change management process but could also fit with a whole range of business analysis tools.