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. And all the while we are…

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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 thought…

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The Value Of Connection In A Low Touch World

What matters in a world where….we can tell a device to order the shopping, place our coffee order without speaking, have a conversation involving thumbs and zero eye contact and before we know it, get to our destination in a driverless car? What’s scarce today will be even more scarce tomorrow. And that’s our opportunity.…

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Showing Up For Humans, Not Just For Google

I want to send some flowers to a friend a few suburbs away, of course I could deliver them myself, but there is something magical about the unexpected arrival of flowers that means I want to have them delivered. And so I turn to Google. After 20 minutes I find myself on page ten feeling…

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The Misleading Advantage

The little gelato place down the road from us is dying. For three years straight they were the only good enough ice cream place in the boat harbour. The lack of competition meant that they could steadily increase their prices from $3.80 per scoop to $5.80 while continuing to staff the store with young, casual,…

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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…

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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 for your…

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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 that shelves…

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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 fall in…

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Are You Using Soft Data To Create Value?

It seems like a no brainer to suppose that local businesses like a cafes, dry cleaners or dental surgeries—the kinds of businesses that serve the same customers week in week out, where the staff have the opportunity to look their customers in the eye, would take advantage of the fact that they look their customers…

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