What Your Competitors Can’t Copy

Back in the day our neighbour had to buy her gluten-free products from a tiny and very expensive range of products at the local pharmacy. If you wanted organic products you trekked across town to a speciality store. Not so today. As demand drives supply, competitors enter new markets and what was once a tiny…

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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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The Business You’d Want To Visit

Matthew Weiner, the creator of the wildly successful TV series Mad Men carried that script around with him for four years, shopping the idea to whoever would listen. During that time people asked him if he was aware of how uncommercial his idea was before they rejected it. The reason the folks at AMC agreed…

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Your Most Important Customers

The most important customers (listeners, audience members and followers) are not the ones you gain, but the ones you keep. It’s all very well to measure how many people have signed up or walked through the door, quite another to understand who is really listening and what they care about. Numbers and foot traffic are…

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Re-imagining Your Business Growth Mindset

How is your business going to grow? When we think about marketing we are usually thinking about tactics we can use to attract new customers. Our stories are often designed to make people who don’t notice or care to buy or switch. The other way to scale is to retain a customer—to gain both his…

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Marketing In The Connection Economy

Traditional marketing, conceived for an industrial age asks us to believe in the wisdom of the funnel. Create something for most people, compete for the interest of some of them and convert a handful to customers. Ironically what works in the connected economy, where our potential customers have access to information and choices, is the…

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The Art Of Selling

Buying is defined as the acquisition of one thing in exchange for something else. Of course it goes beyond ownership or the trading of things. Buying is an exchange of trust and value—a belief in promises we expect will be kept. Selling is described as the transfer of goods or services in exchange for money.…

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The Story Creates The Customer

Have you ever noticed what happens at the organic cafe? As the customer places an order he asks what’s in it. This happens almost every single time. The experience, our posture and products—the story, create the customer. When we encourage people to believe something matters, we attract the kind of people who care about that…

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