The Easy Way To Create A Mission And Vision Statement

There’s something beyond skill, talent, investment and resources that powers the most successful companies, and that’s a clear sense of where they are going and why. When you have a compass it’s not only easier to get to where you want to go, it’s also possible to take people with you. I’ve written previously about…

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The Power Of What We Measure

It’s easier than ever before to create a set of metrics by which to monitor our progress and measure our success. Click-through rates, subscriber numbers, impressions and customer lifetime value are useful data points. What if we measured our success by the results we delivered for our customers? Not what the customer did for us,…

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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 would change how a particular…

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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…

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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, without knowing if the couple has…

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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 though is affinity. The…

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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…

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The Importance Of The First Stroke

The coach leaned forward on her handle bars and across the bike path at the side of the lake. The four girls in the boat who had been training since sun up hung on her every word. “I want you to focus on the first stroke, nothing else. Just keep thinking I am going to…

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Why You Need To Abandon The ‘Everyone’ Mindset

I recently got an email that began…. ‘Hi everyone,’ I didn’t make it past the second word and your customers won’t either. We are too busy, distracted, tired, wary, focused, selfish, savvy or [fill in your blank here], to care about something that’s for everyone. The only messages that get through are the ones that…

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