marketing
1,028 posts
How To Sell An Idea With A Better Story
This is the story of Brick Maier who sold a cardboard box and a poster for $49 and got his Kickstarter Project backed within a week all because he knew how to tell a better story. Brick didn’t just tell us about dimensions and weight or specifications and functionality. He framed an ideal and painte
What Does It Take To Be In The 1%?
”99% of ”brands” are about as inspiring, interesting, and enlightening as a cup of lukewarm tea. Which is exactly why you shouldn’t be.” -Umair Haque So the good news then is that it’s not that hard to be the 1%! I asked Umair what he thought it took to be in the 1 %. He…
How Do Your Customers Feel?
When was the last time you stepped into your customers shoes? Sat in your packed restaurant, queued at check in, ordered from your website, read your label, stopped to digest an email you sent, analysed your design brief, slept in your rooms and really experienced what it feels like to do business w
Go Where The Others Won’t Go
Have you ever watched someone learning to ice skate? Perhaps you’ve been there too? When people are starting out, hopelessly uncoordinated and a bit scared they do what all the other fearful learners do, they cling to the sides for dear life. It feels a little safer there in amongst the pack. Not st
Selling The Benefits
Tell stories, don’t write descriptions. Speak to hearts, not minds. Paint a picture of the effect. Tap into the senses. Illustrate the impact. Describe the joy, the relief, the pleasure. Give people a reason to care. Show them how you’re different. Then let them know why it matters. Image by Cliff R
Create What People Want
When Ken and Nick lamented the passing of old-style pastrami and then decided to do something about it, they probably had a hunch that there were people who felt just like they did. Once they set to work tasting and testing and re-inventing the ultimate American comfort food they knew they were onto
Why Startups Stall
It’s easy to start something today. Now that the gatekeepers are leaving their gates and the barrier to entry is lower than ever, anyone with an idea and an Internet connection can start a business. You don’t need a big staff on payroll or a factory to get the work done. So more people are…
10 Things To Do With Happy Customers
1. Treasure and thank them. Then work really hard to keep them. 2. Connect them to each other. 3. Reward their loyalty. 4. Give them platforms and places to engage with your brand. 5. Listen to their ideas. 6. Watch how they interact with your product. 7. Ask them what you could be doing better.…
Why The Price Doesn’t Always Matter
At the start of the last school year as I stood in a queue I overheard a mother asking an assistant if the $200 calculator she was holding would be coming down in price. The assistant replied that this had been the price for a while, pointing out that the calculator was only required for…
Marketing Is All About Values
In 1997 Steve Jobs was unhappy about how much Apple was spending on marketing and about the message the company was communicating. He realised that in an increasingly noisy world the chances for any company to be remembered were diminishing and that Apple needed to get really clear about what it was
Story Is The Universal Marketing Tool
Story doesn’t discriminate. It’s not dependent on a big advertising department or celebrity endorsement. It’s the universal marketing tool available to anyone. That includes you. When Target had a store in every suburb. Zappos had a story about delivering ‘wow through service’. When Borders had floo
A Reason To Decide
She spotted the black dress just as she was about to give up. It was perfect. She imagined how it would cling in all the right places at the party on Friday night. And how she would feel when he spotted her across the crowded room. The reason you buy the dress isn’t the same…
Why Bother?
Why bother having a customer care line that informs of a thirty minute wait and asks people to call back later? Why bother selling an awards based credit card, then capping the points your customers can earn? Why bother creating cheap for the masses, when you can deliver quality to the few? Why both
Don’t Worry So Much About Awareness
Just the thought of the kind of marketing dollars the big brands will have invested in advertising for the Olympics is enough to make my eyes water. The result, millions of dollars worth of beautifully shot, feel good commercials that probably won’t sell many more phone plans or gold cards. Awarenes
How To Attract More Of The Right Customers
How can you attract more of the customers you want to work with? Easy. Tell people who you want to work with. Tell them with your pricing and your website copy. Talk about your values. Frame your scarcity. Don’t be afraid to spell it out. When Tiffany & Co (who position themselves as the world’s…
Apple’s Not-So-Secret Marketing Secret
Why would anyone buy a 13 inch MacBook Air? Why not buy the Pro? It’s faster, has more memory, it’s actually only 700 grams heavier and .7cm thicker (or 2.4cm ‘thin’ in Applespeak) and it costs exactly the same. Why pay a chunk of cash for less of something? When I asked my Twitter friends…
They Miss Us Now We’re Gone
The shopping malls are empty and the big department store owners are worried. They’ve finally got the memo. They realise that they can’t out-stock Amazon, or price match the guy from Seoul selling wallets on eBay. So they’re trying to woo us back with loyalty cards, air miles and faster ways to chec
We Don’t Have To
We arrived at the restaurant right on time, because we knew they needed the table by 7pm for the next booking. The waitress forgot to smile as we pushed open the door, where the sign still read ‘closed’. “We’ll be open in three minutes!” she barked. Oh. The smile never made an appearance. But that’s
How To Charge What You’re Worth
The days when you clocked in and out, and got paid by the hour for dipping squares of caramel into big vats of icing, (pink or white—a job my mother did for years), at the factory, are largely gone. You don’t get paid for showing up. And yet that’s how many creative entrepreneurs try to…
The Story Makes The Product Better
For three decades, 10% of the population of the tiny Welsh town, Cardigan, made jeans. 35,000 pairs every week. Then one day the factory died, and the jean artisans could no longer practice their art. They simply had no way to do the thing they did well, until Hiut Denim was founded. Now the company
