relevance
546 posts
Motivating People To Buy
Imagine you have taken your children on a day trip to the seaside. It’s the perfect day, the sun is shining, the waves are lapping the shore and you’re having a day that you’ll never forget. There is a new gelato shop across the street selling home made ices at $5 a scoop. Clearly as…
The New Story Of Value
Jen is a passionate entrepreneur who has been working on her project for over three years. This project is Jen’s baby—she lives and breathes it. You know the feeling. Jen was finally at the stage of trademarking her company internationally, and because she wanted to do things right she engaged a law
Clever Marketing
Do you remember those TV ads that succeeded in interrupting or engaging us for sixty seconds? That’s what we used to call clever marketing. Today, clever marketing is no longer about creating the best advertising campaign, it’s about understanding your customer’s worldview and how they want to feel—
The Story Behind Your Metrics
Lines out the door. An email list that is growing at breakneck speed. Dozens of five star reviews on Yelp. More users, subscribers or members all adding to the value of your platform. These are the stuff entrepreneurial dreams are made of. Measuring growth and how it happens feels important. But ‘mo
6 Brand Storytelling Lessons From Santa Claus
I will never forget the day that the illusion of Santa was destroyed for my children. We were at a local tourist attraction in the UK during school holidays, a visit to Santa was included in the ticket. We joined the queue just after 1pm to discover that Santa had gone to lunch and would…
Who Will This Matter To?
Conventional innovation and marketing wisdom reminds us not to come up with good ideas for products or services to sell, but to solve problems instead. People need to eat, but don’t have time to cook, so open a cafe or design a new food processor with an extra chopping function. The result is six ‘m
How To Find Tomorrow’s Customers
Most businesses, whatever their size are focused on growth. We want more leads, more fans, readers or subscribers, who will become more customers, resulting in more sales and more profits. We usually have a plan to get them, which involves cultivating the people we hope will be tomorrow’s customers.
What’s The Best Way?
When I was a new mum thinking about ‘the best way’ to raise my son to do the things that babies of his age were supposed to do, occupied a fair amount of my time. I worried about the best way to settle him to sleep and the best way to wean him. I graduated…
The Relationship Between Curiosity And Business Growth
Whenever I visit the tiny local florist I am the only customer and the most bizarre thing happened when I stopped off there last Friday evening. The entire floor was filled with buckets and buckets of multi-coloured roses. It was so full there was barely room to navigate to the register to pay. I th
How Does Your Marketing Really Make People Feel?
Imagine it’s a busy Thursday morning and you’re replying to the emails that came in overnight from people you were eager to hear from, when out of nowhere an unsolicited sales email interrupts your flow. Of course it’s just one email, it only takes a second to delete it, so where’s the harm in a…
The First Step To Building A Marketing Campaign
As marketers we tend to get lost in the tactics like designing flyers, scheduling tweets and growing a Facebook following—this makes us forget the more important stuff. A campaign by definition is “a systematic course of aggressive activities for some specific purpose”. The following is hard for you
Why Visibility Is Overrated
“TRY OUR TAPAS” screamed the sandwich board on the pavement outside the empty restaurant as the customers spilled out onto the pavement waiting for tables at the cafe next door. True story. One of my clients recently did a marketing audit and found that a third of his business came from repeat clien
Six Things Focus Groups Won’t Tell You
If you’re a fan, you may remember the scene in Mad Men where Peggy—fairly new to the job, joins the other girls from the typing pool in a lipstick testing experiment. All the while the ad executives are secretly looking on and taking notes from behind a two way mirror. The ad guys were smart…
The Trouble With Marketing And The Opportunity For The Future
I met with a prospective client recently who had acted on conflicting advice about marketing tactics from a couple of different sources and failed to get the results he’d hoped for. “The trouble with marketers is that each one tries to sell you on their solution.” he said. “The SEO guy will tell you
The Characteristics Of Great Brand Stories
Great brand stories….. Are rooted in truth. Created with intention. Have a bigger purpose beyond a single bottom line. Add intangible value to something that was once a commodity. Take time. Make the customer the hero. Change how people feel about a product or service. Start with the customer’s stor
Who Is This Marketing For?
Before holding the meeting. Before working on the strategy. Before choosing the medium. Before building the website. Before writing a single word of copy. Ask yourself, “Who is this marketing for?” If the answer is, “It’s for our shareholders, the board, my boss, or so we can feel safe doing what we
What Does Your Marketing Do?
Marketing is something we do every day and yet we forget to think about the result of what we do beyond how it helps our businesses. We think we design marketing for our customers when mostly we design it to solve an immediate need we have as business owners. When you think about what your…
How To Begin Developing A Product Story
While the guy shopping at the hardware store might think he’s comparing the features and benefits of the latest drills what he’s actually doing is imagining all of those shelves beautifully hung. We like to believe that our product story begins with the customer’s relationship to the product, when i
The Purpose Of Collecting Data
Data collection shouldn’t simply be about looking for proof or testing your assumptions. Your questions are not always about collating the right answers, often they are about finding out who the right people are. The idea isn’t just to get the data, it’s to understand the people who want to be under
Valuable Things We Ignore In The Quest For Growth
One of the first words a baby learns to say is ‘more’. They learn very early on that this one word is the shortest route to getting what they want. Every three year old knows that two cupcakes are better than one. It’s no surprise then that this lesson stays with us through life and…
