The Key To A Great Product Story

As an entrepreneur or business leader, you will inevitably be asked how your product or service is different from your competitor’s. Often this question comes from someone who isn’t even a potential customer (but that’s another story). Our fallback position is to lead with features and benefits. We describe tiny, incremental improvements we’ve made in…

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Uncommon And Unmistakable

A colleague in the university sector was attending a marketing event. The presenter’s first slide showed a university’s promotional materials—complete with the typical ‘DREAM LARGE’ and ‘DESIGN THE FUTURE’ type tagline. He then polled the audience, asking if they knew which university it was. A ten minute debate ensued. Many delegates thought it was definitely…

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What Are You Here To Do?

When Deborah Thomas, newly minted CEO of Ardent Leisure, was asked if she knew how to operate a roller coaster, she probably gave an inward sigh along with her considered response. “I’m not here to operate the roller coaster; I’m here to make sure that people queue up and want to spend their money to…

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The Purpose Of Clever Packaging

If you love chocolate as much as I do you’ve probably heard about the Mast Brothers scandal. The artisan chocolate makers are accused of not being completely transparent about their process when they launched in 2007 and of pulling the wool over customers eyes with “clever packaging”. Transparency aside for a moment, because of course…

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The Power Of Posture

How is it that we can go into the same cafe two days running, order the same drink, pay the same price and yet leave feeling entirely different about the experience depending on the interaction we have with the person who is serving? Just as it’s possible for one yogi to hold a more graceful…

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7 Steps To Becoming A More Strategic Marketer

As marketers we spend much of our time and energy on tactics. We agonise over the creation of lead magnets, spend countless hours honing sales pages and perfecting social media promotions. How To Become A More Strategic Marketer 1. Take a long-term view of your business, one that doesn’t require you to go for quick…

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The Power Of Customer Context

There’s a tiny hole-in-the-wall florist in the heart of the city, close to big office buildings and the cafes where people meet for breakfast and lunch. If it were an ordinary florist it would be the kind of place people would walk past on their way to somewhere else. The neighbouring florist’s made-to-order, elaborate, cellophane-wrapped…

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How To Optimise For Customer Delight

“You’re here for the Valium?” blurted the dental receptionist as they arrived. The young man looked blankly at her and then at his mother. He was about to have three wisdom teeth removed under local anaesthetic. He had arrived early to be prepared for the procedure and dutifully took the 20mg of Valium given to…

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The Three Marketing Superpowers—Judgement, Empathy And Timing

Just two days before Christmas while every other retailer was happily dealing with long lines, the outdoor clothing and travel equipment store was empty. Not a customer in sight. They should have been doing a brisk trade in torches, camping accessories and stocking fillers, yet the assistants had plenty of time to finesse the ‘Boxing…

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Double Your Business

Greg opened his diary and booked the new client in. It was a small electrical job, hardly worth going out of his way for the call out fee of $120—the kind of job that most of his competitors wouldn’t have dreamed of booking this close to Christmas when everyone wanted everything yesterday. He turned up…

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