business
512 posts
Are You Using Soft Data To Create Value?
It seems like a no brainer to suppose that local businesses like a cafes, dry cleaners or dental surgeries—the kinds of businesses that serve the same customers week in week out, where the staff have the opportunity to look their customers in the eye, would take advantage of the fact that they look
What Are Your Customer’s Triggers?
We mostly think of buying as an isolated act, something our customers do in the moment. But it’s probably more useful to think of buying as a behaviour. A behaviour is an action or reaction which is triggered and conditioned. We look in the fridge at 8pm and notice that we’re running low on milk,…
The Marketing Shortcut
The fare on sale at the coffee window of our local cafe changes each morning. On Monday homemade protein power balls and muesli bars are strategically laid out to fend off the regret of the weekend’s indulgences. On Tuesday it’s fruit filled muffins and by Friday we’re splashing out with a chocolate
The Business Case For Creating Great Customer Experiences
Saren Indah is a tiny fifteen room hotel in Ubud. It’s hard to stand out from the crowd in a market where amazing seven star resorts line up alongside cheaper than cheap backpacker accommodation. How do you differentiate when you are not the biggest, flashest or cheapest? Saren Indah should be lost
Why This And Not That?
Why do some shoppers choose to pay $3.48 for a 500g bag of Quaker oats when they can buy a kilo of supermarket own brand oats for $3.29, which works out at less than half the price? Why do we feel better as soon as the doctor, armed with nothing more than a lolly stick…
The First And Last Question Your Customers Subconsciously Ask
And the one you must spend a great deal of your time answering…. Why should I care? Why should I care about your new app? Why should I care that your innovation pioneers the latest technology? Why should I care about your fundraising campaign and not that one? Why should I care about the time…
Stop Selling Stuff, Start Selling Stories
David is a genius who happens to sell for a living. I watched him sell a $150 pair of Ugg boots to a woman who had been killing time wandering through his souvenir shop with no big agenda one wet Friday afternoon. He began, not as many salespeople would, by asking what she was looking…
The Value Of Asking What If
Have you ever been stuck waiting outside your hotel room while it was given the daily once over? It turns out that for some guests housekeeping can feel like more of an intrusion than a service. On average it costs a hotel $22 a day to deliver housekeeping services for each room. That figure probabl
The Economics Of Attention
Attention is either earned or paid for. Whether you pay for advertising or not you still buy your audience’s attention every day. You may not pay in dollars and cents, but either way there is a cost attached to getting people to notice or engage. The cost of paid attention (in the form of TV…
How To Hit Your Target
When an archer aims she doesn’t keep her eye on the target. She knows the target is there, but she sees it vaguely, or sometimes not at all. The point of aim is always closer than the target. Hitting the target is determined by how she aims, not by the fact that she’s shooting for…
Why Not Go First?
An article about successful disruptive businesses like Warby Parker or Square spreads like wildfire through social media channels and whole libraries could be filled with stories about what makes Apple unique. It’s natural to want to learn from the successes of others and to wonder how we can borrow
Life After Launch Day—Introducing The One Page Marketing Plan
It’s not hard to remember the lead up to the birth of your first child. Forty weeks of sheer focus on everything from what cheese to eat—or not to eat, to a birth plan that read like a military operation. I always found it odd that there was a ten-point plan for every eventuality during…
What’s More Important Than Building Awareness?
Ask any business owner what their most pressing problem is and ‘building awareness’ is sure to be on the list. Maybe it’s on your list too? In a world where it’s harder to get attention, gaining mind share is a priority for everyone. We think that if we can just get a few more people…
Don’t Make Marketing Your Enemy
I often have conversations with people that start something like this: “I love my work (product, service, designs, vocation and so on), but I hate marketing. People who create often worry if they spend too much time marketing, that there will be no time left to do the work they care about—which they
Tapping Into Empathy
Wherever you are right now stop what you’re doing and listen to the people and the conversations going on all around you. I’ve been working in public places a lot recently and here’s what I’ve found. Nobody is listening to anybody—not really. They’re pretending to listen while they wait for their tu
The Truth About Winning
There is no such thing as something for everyone. More is not a shortcut to mattering. You don’t need the most customers. You don’t have to get all of the people to pick you. You don’t need to win all of the hearts. Image by ChrisJL.
Who Decides What Wins?
The app developer will spend hundreds of man hours writing lines of perfect code in the hope of making his final product the best in the world. The cafe owner could pull thousands of shots in order to create the perfect cup every time. The entrepreneur might invest months agonising over design decis
How To Write Your Mission Statement And 20 Great Mission Statements To Inspire You
Have you ever noticed how we tie ourselves up in knots and overcomplicate things when we put our business hats on? Your mission statement doesn’t need to be long and complex, it’s simply a promise—your statement of intention. A mission statement needs to clarify the answers to the following two ques
Marketing Is About Giving Your Customers A Story To Tell
We’ve been stuck in a time warp for the past fifty years with a marketing model designed to sell things to our grandparents. A model that’s kept media buyers in jobs and many media outlets afloat. Marketing used to be what we told our customers to believe about us. What matters more now is how…
Where Wile E. Coyote Went Wrong
Do you remember those old cartoons where Wile E. Coyote is so focused on outsmarting The Road Runner that he inevitably ends up getting in his own way? He spends so much time and energy trying to be one step ahead of the bird that he forgets what his end goal was. It’s easy (and…
