value
679 posts
3 Questions To Help Your Business Evolve With Your Customers
The sign next to the juice bar announces that waiting is over. “Don’t Line UP. Order on our app.” No interruption to your day required. Have you noticed how waiting has gone out of fashion and the slew of products, apps, services and shortcuts that have come to market which are designed to give us…
Taking Your Place In The Difference Economy
Whole Foods launched it’s first national and TV marketing campaign in 35 years on the back of losing 30% of its value in just six months. The company has been losing market share to chains like Walmart who are now stocking once hard to find sustainable and organic produce and selling it cheaper. The
Getting Your Message ‘Out There’
When I was fifteen it cost fifty pence to go a see U2 play live to a tiny audience in the function room of the Rathfarnham Inn. A group of girls from my school who were die hard fans and too young to get into a pub at night applied three layers of eyeliner, half…
The Best Marketing In The World
It’s easy to know why the features you built into your products and services are important, but it takes a particular skill to understand and communicate why they should matter to people. The best marketing in the world doesn’t remind people how great the company is or how many features have been ad
How Everything Truly Great Is Inspired
This is the story of a trap we all fall into. Every single entrepreneur or creator without exception is thrown off course by following a similar pattern. It doesn’t matter if you are on the board of a Fortune 500 or a designer trying to get her blog off the ground. The same struggle happens…
The Meaning Business
In the past most businesses gained competitive advantage from size, scale or dominance. Whoever the biggest marketing budget and could sell the most stuff won. Success was more about what you did and much less about the way that you did it. But today it’s the way that you go about your business and
What’s The Reason?
What’s your reason for contacting that prospect? Why do you call her a prospect anyway? What’s your reason for sending that email? Why will everything be okay if you can just get the word out? What’s your reason for printing those fliers? Why does the world need your thing? What’s your reason for st
My New Book—Marketing: A Love Story
My new book is here. You can buy it now on Amazon in paperback and in Kindle. I’ve wanted to find a way to juxtapose the concepts of marketing and love in a book for a long time. I like to think that even if you never opened the book, just owning it—seeing it on…
The Two Approaches To Marketing
All marketing uses two basic approaches. When I was growing up and maybe when you were too, marketers used ‘The Influence Method’. 1. The Influence Method Make a product. Create an advertising campaign, jingle or tagline to persuade people to want whatever you are selling. Increase sales. Make more
Efficiency, Quality, Value And Soul
A new public hospital is opening in Perth this week and along with cutting edge medical facilities patients can expect a state-of-the-art “free-roaming food delivery robots”. Our local newspaper reported that, “The 300kg AGVs will deliver up to 2200 meals a day, directly to wards without human inter
10 Characteristics Of Disruptive Innovations
Any one of a number of giant companies could have been first to market with a bagless vacuum cleaner. They all knew that their cleaners lost suction when dust bags became full. They also knew how their customers wrestled to empty dust bags while being enveloped by the dirt they’d just sucked up out
Which Would You Choose?
If you could only pick only one of the following, which would you choose? 1. Would you like more people to know about you, your product or service? OR 2. Would you like your existing customers to be blown away by you, your product or service? Awareness doesn’t always scale. But creating difference f
Where Are The Holes?
It’s hard to be objective when you evaluate your competitors. When you’re feeling vulnerable there is a tendency to think about all of the things your competitors are doing right and how you don’t measure up against them. The irony is that opportunities are realised and groundbreaking ideas are brou
The New Consumer Relationship
In the days before self-service shopping and before every home had a fridge, the responsibility for daily grocery shopping fell to women. The consumer was someone who came to passively buy what was on offer. While a 1955 focus group could persuade Birdseye to make fish fingers from cod rather than h
What Lens Do You Use?
I’m a huge fan of Human’s of New York. It’s the kind of generous and rare content on the Internet that makes you grateful, sad and optimistic all at once. Brandon (lying down in the photo above because he is 6’4″ and always wants to get down to the level of his subject), will happily…
Two Simple Questions Most Content Marketers Forget To Ask
For fifty years marketing was all about pushing. We used advertising to get us closer to our end goal—which was more sales. Today marketing is more about drawing people closer. We use content (amongst other things) to help us build relationships with potential customers. And yet sometimes we forget
How Are You Creating Value?
Think about your favourite airline or a product you use every day and the supermarket you feel most comfortable shopping at. Now think about why you keep going back. What is it that this business delivers? The airline most likely sells similar seats, with average legroom, at around the same price as
Who Is Responsible For Seeing Your Customers?
When I worked in the stock control department at Tesco thirty years ago, I was partly responsible for making sure there were enough tins of soup available to be bought by the customers who would walk up and down those supermarket aisles the following week. There were people in charge of making sure
How Great Products Are Born, Not Made
When you’re designing a product or service it’s easy to believe that making it the best in the world is what gives you a competitive advantage. But the thing about ‘best’ is that it’s subjective. ‘Best’ isn’t determined by you, it’s your customers and users who decide. The truth is that people don’t
What Will Change Once The Word Gets Out?
On the day after ‘the word gets out’ about your product or service, will you have a thousand news followers on Twitter? Will the kingmaker call? Will your inbox have ten new client leads? Will your stock be flying off the shelves? Will your business be better? Will your bank balance be healthy enoug
