Posts Tagged ‘marketing’
What The Best Marketers Know
The call centre operator insists ‘this is not a cold call’. She knows time is running out, so she desperately accelerates her sales pitch—speaking without pausing to either breathe or listen. She was trained to believe it’s possible to close the sale if she can just impart all the information in her script. Sadly, she’s…
Read MoreFlipping The Focus Group
We’ve been using focus groups for eighty years in an attempt to understand how to create things people want to buy and messages they want to hear. And while we question what our customers like and what demographic they fit into, we rarely think about who they are beyond the choices they make. What if…
Read MoreA World Built On Promises
Today you woke in a bed the manufacturer promised would give you a good nights sleep. You ate something for breakfast that was made in a factory you have never visited or grown by someone you have never met. You belted yourself into a car with a safety rating you have no way of verifying…
Read MoreThe Value Of An Internal Brand Narrative
In a commercial world, we use stories tactically to convince and convert prospective customers. We work hard to change minds and capture hearts, with persuasive words and evocative images in an attempt to make an emotional connection with the people we want to reach. The stories we tell our customers form our external narrative. We’re…
Read MoreChoosing The Customers You Want
More cafes in Melbourne have begun offering a 10% discount to customers who bring a reusable cup. It’s an intentional choice that says something about their values and those of their customers. Theses cafes are attracting the kind of customers they want to serve. The clothing store manager gets disgruntled when people rarely buy full…
Read MoreWhat Do You Want Your Brand Story To Do?
What’s the role of storytelling in your business? What are you expecting your brand story to do? Most of us tell stories to describe the value we create. Storytelling is a tactic used to convince or convert prospects to customers—a way to close the sale. We’re selling the power of story short. Before they had…
Read MoreWhy Not Make Something Great?
Like his grandfather, before him, Shane was in the textiles business. He made good socks for a living until the day he realised that pretty soon there would be no living to be made in a product that was good enough. His company was struggling to differentiate from and compete with big retailers who could…
Read MoreThe Limitations Of Marketing To Persuade
We assume sales and marketing are simply a case of fulfilling unspoken desires or unmet needs and making the people with those needs aware we’ve solved their problem. But there’s another piece of the marketing puzzle we often overlook—the doubts our customers must overcome. People don’t just want to know that our products and services…
Read MoreWhat’s On Your Y-Axis?
The strategy for any project or business and even our days, weeks and months could be plotted on a graph using an x-axis and a y-axis. What every endeavour has in common is time. This is plotted on the horizontal x-axis. What we can change or influence is represented on the vertical y-axis. In a…
Read MoreThe Visibility Paradox
A bullet point list of tactics to increase your visibility might include; perfecting your elevator pitch, networking, forming strategic partnerships or creating a compelling press release. You don’t need to look far to see that we’re expending a lot of time and resources metaphorically waving our arms in an attempt to be seen. The irony…
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