Skill Vs. Talent

The dentist looks inside the patient’s mouth. She completes her examination, makes an assessment and proposes treatment. The proposed treatment considers only two things. What’s going on inside the patient’s mouth and his ability to pay. The dentist knows she can fix the problem. She wants to do a good job. This is the work…

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The Rise Of The Patient Marketer

The fact that we’re exposed to thousands of marketing messages every day is old news. Our lives are now designed to mitigate against being interrupted by things we don’t care about and never respond to. And yet, we often fail to acknowledge that the people we want to reach feel the same way. If we’re…

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The First Marketing Myth

Logic tells us that just because someone is aware of a product or service doesn’t mean they will buy it. We know that people are not short of choices. And yet when it comes to marketing our products and services, we prioritise awareness all the time. Logic goes out the window. We fool ourselves into…

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What’s Your Customer’s Context?

Yesterday I got chatting to Sarah in the street about the sofa she didn’t buy. Sarah, who has three daughters under the age of seven had been looking for the perfect sofa for ages. When she finally found the perfect one she put down a deposit on it and waited for it to arrive a…

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Back To Basics Marketing

Our neighbours are having the outside of their house painted. It’s an old Victorian property, built in the 1800s with period features and delicate ironwork. I’ve watched the decorators come and go over the past couple of weeks. Seen them taking care to cover the original tiles on the porch, that could so easily be…

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The Tyranny Of Checking

There are jobs, and there is work that relies on the professionals checking. We want our surgeons, pilots and firefighters to check and double check. That isn’t the kind of checking most of us do now. It seems that we’ve unintentionally made a career out of checking. We spend many hours a day checking notifications,…

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Better By Degrees

The track and field coach Bill Bowerman spent twenty-four years training athletes at the University of Oregon to optimise their performance. Bowerman was also the co-founder of Nike, and most famously the inventor of the waffle sole running shoe (which he prototyped by pouring rubber into the family’s waffle iron). Bowerman’s innovation made the shoe…

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The Ready And Willing

The sandwich boards positioned on the footpath. Posters pasted inside the bus shelter. A pair of charity fundraisers stationed outside the university. All marketing tactics designed with one goal in mind—to make the product, business or cause more visible. The reason our marketing falls flat is that the people we want to serve are not…

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In Time

You don’t know for sure that the broccoli at the local organic store was grown sustainably or without pesticides, but you trust that it was and you’re happy to pay more for it.  You have no proof that like the label says the bread gluten-free until long after you’ve eaten it, but you don’t question…

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The Value Of Goals And Outcomes

We tend to think of goals and outcomes as one and the same. They’re not. Let’s say your goal is to run a marathon. Crossing the line at the end of the twenty-sixth mile is your goal. But the effect of the actions you take by trying to achieve that goal is worth more than…

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