matter
444 posts
The Most Dangerous Thing About Your Competition
….is your obsession with them. Yes, we live in a giant digital goldfish bowl. This makes it possible to get stuck watching and worrying about what our competitors are doing. Almost every move they make, every accolade, acquisition and award is there for the world to see. It’s far more productive and
10 Ways To Stand In Your Customer’s Shoes
When LEGO was developing a castle play set they brought fans of all ages together to get feedback. The adults loved it. “But where’s the dragon?” the children asked. The adults explained that there were no dragons in Medieval times. “Where’s the fun in that?” the kids replied. So, the dragon was bor
How To Get The World To Beat A Path To Your Door
Traditional marketing in essence has been about doing something today in the hope that your business will reap the rewards in sales tomorrow. The marketer then has her eye firmly fixed on the future. Asking the question, ‘what do I need to do to get us from here to there?’ And yet the best marketing
It’s Here—The Book That Will Reinvent Your Marketing
It’s incredible to think about the changes that have happened to our lives and businesses in the last decade. Now instead of guessing what our customers are thinking we can actually listen to what they want. We can see what they are doing all of the time, in real time. And yet, we’re still using…
It’s Harder To Matter On Purpose
It’s easy to think about what it would be like to build your business around the quick win. To be the author of the book discovered by a random stranger at the airport, or the designer who gets picked by the awards committee. It’s much harder to matter on purpose, to be intentional about the…
Significance Could Be Your Competitive Advantage
You’re late for an appointment and in your rush to get out the door you forget to put everything into your bag. QUESTION Which would you rather FORGET to bring with you, your wallet or your phone? 2006 ANSWER PHONE. 2014 ANSWER WALLET. A competitive advantage isn’t always as tangible as the patents
Success Is How Your Customers Feel
You’ve just had a great launch. You made your monthly sales targets. Your stock sold out in one day. There are a hundred and one reasons to celebrate, and one thing to remember. Success is not just a data point that you hit on the sales chart, or a dollar figure that makes your accountant…
Redefining What It Means To ‘Go Viral’
Your idea is not a virus and here’s why. A virus doesn’t care who it infects. Everyone is a target. A virus’s only reason to be a virus is to survive. You actually care about the people who use your products, read your book, or sign up for your service. You are not in the…
The Number One Way To Create Value In Any Marketplace
In an era when we can push a button on our phones to summon a driver, why is shopping for a television still a nightmare? I doubt that there is a single person in the history of the universe who has enjoyed shopping for a TV. That row upon row of yellow stickered, feature described…
How Apple Succeeded, While Others Failed
When Apple designed their first store, they made sure that over half of it was dedicated to what they called, ‘solutions’. The store wasn’t stacked ceiling to floor with inventory, instead it was a wall-to-wall space of discovery. While most retailers were showing people what they had in stock, Appl
Why We Advertise
Ad spending is set to increase this year. And yet, some of the smartest and fastest growing companies on the planet elect to grow their businesses through word of mouth, by delighting their customers. So, why do we still buy banner ads? Is it because……? 1. Our products and services don’t create diff
Why Attention Is No Longer Our Scarcest Resource
If you want to capture someone’s attention you’ve got about ten seconds to convince them that you are the one. Attention spans are shrinking. People have so many demands, diversions and distractions right there in their pockets every minute of every day that it’s getting harder and harder to hold th
Value Is A Story We Want To Believe
If you’ve ever doubted that we are, as Jill Bolte Taylor says, “feeling creatures who think” just stop in the salt section of your local supermarket. Salt is as close to free as any product can get. You can buy a kilo for a dollar, or a Pink Himalayan variety for sixty times that price.…
Marketing Is Not A Department
It’s 9pm on Sunday night and a line of eager customers with cash in hand snakes down Victoria Street and around the corner. Not one customer who joins is surprised by the line and nobody gives up and leaves it. The effort it seems is clearly worth the reward. Gelato Messina is a Sydney institution.…
Is Getting More Blog Traffic Really Your Goal?
As traditional marketing (read advertising) becomes less and less effective businesses are turning to content marketing. The metric of many content marketers, as it was of advertisers is still more. How can I get more traffic to my blog? How can we turn our unique visitors into pageviews? How can we
Hope Is Not A Marketing Strategy
There’s a tiny market in Potts Point every Sunday. Each week the stallholders show up and hope. They hope that someone who might be their customer will show up too. The stallholders sell things that a passer-by might want, usually things that they could get somewhere else if they weren’t going to bu
Do It Like You Mean It
I’m not sure if it was the fact that she was reading a hardback book that made me notice the woman at the back of the cafe. When was the last time you saw someone reading a hardback book? When I asked her what she was reading, she flipped it over. Self help—2014 was going…
Don’t Make Me Click, Make Me Care
There’s no denying it calls to action are important and increasingly so in a world of infinite choices. We have less and less time to give people a reason to choose us. Calls to action matter, not just because we want people to do what we want them to do when they visit our websites,…
The Question Your Competitors Forgot To Ask
The foundation of many businesses is a simple what. What do we serve and sell, for how much, at what profit margin? Getting stuck in ‘the what’ puts you squarely in the commodities business. If the value you create is purely tangible then you’re not giving people a reason to care about your brand, o
The Real Reason The Microsoft Store Is Empty
Clues about what matters to people and how their emotions drive their choices are all around us and there’s no better time to see evidence of this in action than during the festive season. Slate recently posted two images that tell two very different brand stories. Both photos were taken on what sho
