Marketing
920 posts
There’s Only One Way To Get A Different Outcome
We should have known as soon as we walked in. The place was empty, not a soul in sight apart from two lone waiters who pounced. Every other breakfast place in the city was teeming with life and overflowing with plates of over easy eggs. This place was dead. We stayed because we didn’t have…
Buy Versus Buy Into
Don’t be the brand that people buy. Be the one they ‘buy into’. Image by Peter Morgan.
What Don’t You Do?
It’s easy to rattle off the features of your product or benefits of your service. Which means it’s not hard for the competition to do that too. Far more difficult to stand for something and be willing to stand out because of what you don’t do. It turns out that time and again telling the…
Anticipation Is Your Point Of Differentiation
Brand new guest rooms, sleek kitchenettes, minibars and bright, new bathrooms were only the start of the boutique hotel’s story. The ‘dream pillow menu’ gave me six choices from buckwheat to hypo-allergenic, duck down to Swedish memory foam. And yet…..there was no chance of an early check in after a
What Your Clients Need Now
They need you to ask the right questions, not to have all the answers. They need your generosity, not jargon. They need the truth. They need what works for them, not what makes you look good. They need faith in you and your intention. They need to be empowered more than they need to be…
Petrol Station Flowers
‘Petrol station flowers’ never quite hit the mark. It’s obvious to both the giver and the receiver that they were unplanned….an afterthought. That the giving of them lacked the thing that’s more important than the blooms themselves. The intention. We care about the intention as much as the gift, oft
Confusing Price With Value
There’s a company here in Perth charging $70 an hour to weed gardens. Just weeding, and perhaps a light trim of garden shrubs. Nothing more. They don’t mow lawns (there are already thousands of guys doing that). They do the job that nobody else wants to take on. The job that plenty of time poor…
The Rocket Artist
We went to a new cafe by accident today. We were late and didn’t feel like queuing for a table at our regular place. Donny, they guy wearing the apron who came to clear the table recognised we were new and asked how we’d enjoyed the coffee. We struck up a conversation about where they…
Marketing Is….
mar-ket-ing noun 1. the act of buying or selling in a market. 2. the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing and selling. Actually marketing is….. finding ways to tell the story of what you d
Crafting Your Intention
I met a really passionate financial planner recently who was a bit stuck about how to craft a 30 second pitch to deliver to the people he met at networking events. The problem was that while he was agonising over finding the right words he lost the ability to communicate his intention. If you have…
Rethinking The Sales Process
The food halls and nail bars were humming last Thursday evening. Apparently when they have a few extra shopping hours people want to do one of two things, grab a bite to eat or have their nails done. The designer clothes boutiques were dead. Not a soul in sight in any of them, apart from…
What’s The Formula?
There was no formula for being commissioned by Starbucks to design the Red Christmas Cup, so Johanna Basford created one. There was no step-by-step guide to building a brand around ‘delivering wow through service’ before Zappos did it. And yet that’s what we want. The how to, the instructions, the r
The Fortune Cookie Principle™
Every idea, innovation, product and service has two elements. The cookie…. the commodity, the utility, the tangible, the facts, the logical benefit. The cookie is the thing you put in the shop window which has a fixed inherent value. Then there’s the fortune, the intangible part of the product or se
The Easy Way Out
A $6000 full page advert in a magazine with a readership of 200,000 people might feel like a bargain. All those eyeballs connected to all those credit cards just waiting to discover you. Now all the advert must do is convince people to pick up the phone. Buying ads feels safe, but handing over adver
People Don’t Buy What You Do
Michael and Phil Farrell knew how to sell steak. They didn’t do it by having an abundance of tasty cuts in their shop window to tempt strangers or passers by who might fancy a t-bone for dinner that evening. No, they did it by knowing the name of every single customer who walked through their…
The Elephant In The Room
John (not his real name) was discussing the features and benefits of a new product he’s bringing to market with me yesterday. He had a niggle, a way which his product worked that other products in the same category didn’t. An elephant in the room. He wondered if this might be a problem. What if…
A Better Way To Say It
There’s a little funeral chapel a few kilometres from where I live. A place that’s a far cry from the draughty stone churches I remember from my childhood in Dublin. A beautiful warm room with skylights that allow the sunshine in. It’s surrounded by bush and a cemetery where kangaroos roam and eat t
No Strings
Alexx saw the sign outside the local gym and decided that there was no excuse. It was just a hundred metres from her front door and was advertising a six week membership for just $99. An opportunity not to be missed. As she signed up Alexx tried to overlook the quiet desperation of the owner.…
Speak Human
The new perspex sign in the toilets of fast food restaurant read… “It is our intent to provide you with the cleanest possible facility. If the room needs attention please notify a Manager.” I stood in the mirrorless bathroom looking at it for some time wondering how this was supposed to make me feel
Selling The Facts
Front row seats. That ring in a certain ‘blue box’. 70% dark chocolate. Business class flights. Pumpkins at Halloween. Botox. iPad mini. Frappuccino. 12 months gym membership in January. Free range chicken. The bestseller everyone is talking about. That black BMW. Vitamins. The honeymoon suite. Glut
