Blog
Are You Shouting Over the Clutter or Carving It Up?
Big ideas are overrated. Too much company advertising, too little customer interest and too powerful computer technology have rendered the excessive marketing habits of the past obsolete and wasteful, tolerated at best and loathed at worst. It’s not about shouting over the clutter, it’s about carving it up, cutting through it and connecting with people on the other side with ideas that are small, simple, smart and social. The…
Do You Communicate All Three Dimensions of Your Value?
When you sell a commodity, you differentiate through language, purpose, emotion, education, interaction, technology, leadership, narrative, culture, connection, service, support, responsiveness, honesty and humanity. That way, instead of lowering your price, you’re raising your value. And you won’t have to feel like a grain of sand lying on a beach. A smart strategy for doing so is to make the intangible inescapable. To take the service you provide for…
What Beliefs Have You Outgrown?
Every organism has to keep changing just to stay competitive. If we’re not ready to adapt and remake ourselves as the environment changes, the world will evolve and leave us behind. Time waits for no man. Especially not the man addicted to what used to work because he’s romantic about it. Technology is the obvious example. We can insulate ourselves for a while, but eventually, it will become harder…
Allow the Solution to Present Itself
Physics isn’t about the solution. It’s about approaching the problem in a sound, positive, intelligent and systematic way so that the solution presents itself. Interestingly, the same could be said for business. It’s not about selling a product, it’s about approaching an industry in an entirely new way so that the product sells itself. Woolley, a law firm in Stradford, conducts most of their correspondence online by calling attorneys…
Are You Following the Money or Following the Feelings?
Big companies have big hearts. They’re deeply and hopelessly in love with their own marketing, their own products, their own brand values, their own policies, their own language, their own ideas and their own technology. Good. What’s important about this infatuation is, it creates an interesting opportunity for us, the outsiders, the objective observers, the arbiters of unconventional wisdom, to deliver a heroic dose of customer centric perspective by…
Advertising is Dead, Technology is Alive
How we go to market is as important as who we are. With the erosion of competitive advantage, the collapse of distinction and the homogenization of pretty much everything, it’s time to admit that what we sell isn’t that different from the competition. So something has to be. What’s exciting is, the explosive growth of channel and device choices, combined with the connection prowess of the Internet, means that…
Champion Company Cause Through Customer Bravery
Most brands are just beating their chests. Bragging about their organic ingredients, posturing about their benevolent charity efforts, yammering about their innovative technology, posturing about their third round of funding and raving about their company culture. Good for them. But if they’re so great, whey don’t they make their customers feel great? Smart brands champion their causes through other people’s feats and bravery. Undroppable is a campaign and documentary…
Turning a Painful Process into a Pleasurable Practice
Riddle me this. What do doctor’s appointments, getting haircuts, working out, tech support, taking pets to the vet, visiting the hospital, filling out forms, buying a car, sitting in waiting rooms and going to confessional all have in common? These are experiences that most people have always hated. And in every business, there’s a parallel experience. Some transaction, some activity, some part of the process that customers usually view…
What Good is Being Memorable for the Wrong Reasons?
If your word of mouth marketing plan is to put street canvassers at busy intersections to interrupt passerbys, verbally spam them with annoying questions about the cause and hand out pamphlets people are going to throw away ten seconds later, you missed. Mindshare is a neutral entity. Like tofu, it takes on the flavor of whatever sauce it’s immersed in. And yet, organizations spend thousands of hours and millions…
Creating An Atmosphere Worth Coming To
The best stores are temples to belief systems. They’re places to enter into a fantasy world, practice our religion, worship objects of devotion, experience products that inspire fervor, humbly walk in reverie, soak up the ambiance, kibbutz with people who share our worldview, take refuge from everyday life, seek shelter from the winds of the world and feel something closer to love than simple convenience. Which sounds like hyperbole,…
