Posts Tagged ‘fortune cookie principle’
The Truth About Vanilla
Almost one in five people who order an ice cream in the U.S. today will order vanilla. Vanilla then is an easy flavour to make because we know that most people won’t have an objection to it and 17% of people are likely to order it. It feels more risky to be the company that…
Read MoreGood Business Is Always A Matter Of Attitude
We’ve been using the same painter and decorator for years. He’s been with us amid the chaos of three moves and two home renovations. Tom was a young, ambitious bloke when we first met. He was keen to offer a better than average service and at age 25 his goal of doing that was paying…
Read MoreAre 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…
Read MoreAll Of The People, All Of The Time
All around us big vanilla businesses and corporations are struggling to understand how to connect with customers and give people what they want. Businesses like McDonalds are ‘resetting’ and trying to find new ways to improve speed and affordability of their core offerings. Their strategy is to become even faster and cheaper. Meanwhile Mexican food…
Read MoreIntention Is A Competitive Advantage
Having a competitive advantage is not just about being better in ways that can be measured, it’s about understanding your difference and about knowing how that difference will impact the lives of your customers. Great business leaders know what they want to do well and also importantly what they won’t do. While other banks were…
Read MoreThe Marketing Shortcut
The fare on sale at the coffee window of our local cafe changes each morning. On Monday homemade protein power balls and muesli bars are strategically laid out to fend off the regret of the weekend’s indulgences. On Tuesday it’s fruit filled muffins and by Friday we’re splashing out with a chocolate covered something. All…
Read MoreWhy This And Not That?
Why do some shoppers choose to pay $3.48 for a 500g bag of Quaker oats when they can buy a kilo of supermarket own brand oats for $3.29, which works out at less than half the price? Why do we feel better as soon as the doctor, armed with nothing more than a lolly stick…
Read MoreBecome Part Of The Story
I arranged to meet one of my Twitter friends for the first time in the little bar at the front of my hotel. He is a designer from London and as luck would have it we were visiting New York at the same time, (something we discovered through our simultaneous posts of Times Square on…
Read MoreShifting The Focus From Results To Relationships
There’s a problem with how performance is measured by both ourselves and in our organisations. Typically you have a budget and targets to achieve. The purpose of the budget is to make sales go up, or waiting times go down. Our systems are designed to judge and reward us on results. If the campaign you…
Read MoreWhoever Gets Closest To Their Customer Wins
Let’s consider how the business world has been turned on its head in less than a decade. We only need to think about fourteen brands in order to understand the shift. APPLE vs. SONY. AMAZON vs. BORDERS. NETFLIX vs. BLOCKBUSTER. AIRBNB vs. HILTON. UBER vs. CABS. NEST vs. HONEYWELL. TWITTER vs. NEWS CORP. It turns…
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