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What Your Competitors Can’t Copy
Back in the day our neighbour had to buy her gluten-free products from a tiny and very expensive range of products at the local pharmacy. If you wanted organic products you trekked across town to a speciality store. Not so today. As demand drives supply, competitors enter new markets and what was on
3 Questions To Help You Find Your Niche
Look in the jewellery shop windows in any western city and you’ll notice the same trends—rings, bracelets and necklaces designed to appeal to what most people like the look of. Jewellery designer Megan Auman found her niche by marrying her talents as a metalsmith and designer, to create pieces that
The Marketing Should Be Invisible
The vibration you feel when you plug your iPhone in to charge—that’s marketing. The texture of the sheets as you pull back the covers of a hotel bed, jazz playing on a good stereo at the cafe, the ease with which the milk carton opens, daring to have an insane mode—all marketing. We spend a…
Making Things People Want
We are buying fewer pairs of jeans and more yoga pants, eating less gluten and more coconut oil. Trends are not simply a shift in behaviour, they are a sign of a change in the story we want to believe about ourselves. When you develop a product, service or platform it’s not enough to consider…
Nothing And Everything
“Have you got far to go with those?” the assistant asked, while looking me squarely in the eye, as he was deciding how best to pack my groceries. It was the tiniest gesture, nothing much, and yet it was enough to stop me in my tracks, because it’s not what we’ve come to expect. Nobody…
The Business You’d Want To Visit
Matthew Weiner, the creator of the wildly successful TV series Mad Men carried that script around with him for four years, shopping the idea to whoever would listen. During that time people asked him if he was aware of how uncommercial his idea was before they rejected it. The reason the folks at AM
Why Did You Win?
Even when our innovation and marketing succeeds, we don’t always take the time to understand what’s working so that we can replicate it. We gratefully welcome and respond to prospective new customers every day, often without knowing how and why they showed up. Five questions to get you started 1. Ho
10 Ways To Avoid Getting A One Star Review
Dear Business Owner who delivered a one star service experience, Yes, a bad Google review will hurt your business, but delivering the kind of service you’re not proud of and having to keep covering your back will crush your soul. How To Avoid A One Star Review 1. Care twice as much about how your…
Your Most Important Customers
The most important customers (listeners, audience members and followers) are not the ones you gain, but the ones you keep. It’s all very well to measure how many people have signed up or walked through the door, quite another to understand who is really listening and what they care about. Numbers an
Why Most Marketing Fails
It’s hard to communicate your value if you don’t know what the customer’s definition of value is. Most marketing fails because the marketer doesn’t understand the story his customer wants to believe, before he tells the story. So the real estate agent starts describing the proximity to great schools
How To Get The Results You Want
In work, as in life we create a sense of balance by understanding what we want and what we don’t. We prioritize by wanting less of one thing and more of something else. Less overwhelm and more progress. Fewer things to react to and more results. Less busyness and more time. Fewer restrictions and mo
Re-imagining Your Business Growth Mindset
How is your business going to grow? When we think about marketing we are usually thinking about tactics we can use to attract new customers. Our stories are often designed to make people who don’t notice or care to buy or switch. The other way to scale is to retain a customer—to gain both his…
Marketing In The Connection Economy
Traditional marketing, conceived for an industrial age asks us to believe in the wisdom of the funnel. Create something for most people, compete for the interest of some of them and convert a handful to customers. Ironically what works in the connected economy, where our potential customers have acc
The Art Of Selling
Buying is defined as the acquisition of one thing in exchange for something else. Of course it goes beyond ownership or the trading of things. Buying is an exchange of trust and value—a belief in promises we expect will be kept. Selling is described as the transfer of goods or services in exchange f
How You Market Is Who You Become
“EXPOSE YOUR BUSINESS TO 40,000 CARS A DAY.” Read the big sign at a busy junction that would exposure your business to 40,000 cars a day. The way you tell your story asks people to believe something about who you are and what you stand for. It sends us (and you), a signal about what…
The Value Of Giving To Give
A supermarket loyalty card helps the company more than it does the shopper. We all know that it’s less a way of rewarding customer loyalty and more a way of collecting useful data. Much of the ‘giving’ we do in business is because some kind of return is expected down the track. This drawing that…
The Awareness Conundrum
Which is better for your business—more people who know about your brand, or fewer people that it matters to? It’s not hard to make our marketing more urgent with better calls to action, bigger ‘buy now’ buttons or a hundred and one other attention-grabbing tactics that don’t scale. What does scale t
Too Cheap To Be Good
When a friend was shopping around for a logo designer she got several recommendations and then asked for quotes. The range was extraordinary, but no more extraordinary than her reaction. The companies that quoted below what she felt was reasonable were immediately discounted and they lost her busine
The Story Creates The Customer
Have you ever noticed what happens at the organic cafe? As the customer places an order he asks what’s in it. This happens almost every single time. The experience, our posture and products—the story, create the customer. When we encourage people to believe something matters, we attract the kind of
How To Tell The Story Of Your Products
Why is real estate copywriting so terrible? Maybe it’s not that bad in your town or city, but wherever I have lived the copy seems to serve one purpose—to fill the space between the images and the floor plan in the brochure. Here are a couple of examples of copy written to sell million dollar…
