Why We Advertise

Ad spending is set to increase this year. And yet, some of the smartest and fastest growing companies on the planet elect to grow their businesses through word of mouth, by delighting their customers. So, why do we still buy banner ads? Is it because……? 1. Our products and services don’t create difference for our…

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Why Attention Is No Longer Our Scarcest Resource

If you want to capture someone’s attention you’ve got about ten seconds to convince them that you are the one. Attention spans are shrinking. People have so many demands, diversions and distractions right there in their pockets every minute of every day that it’s getting harder and harder to hold them. This is the reason…

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Value Is A Story We Want To Believe

If you’ve ever doubted that we are, as Jill Bolte Taylor says, “feeling creatures who think” just stop in the salt section of your local supermarket. Salt is as close to free as any product can get. You can buy a kilo for a dollar, or a Pink Himalayan variety for sixty times that price.…

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Marketing Is Not A Department

It’s 9pm on Sunday night and a line of eager customers with cash in hand snakes down Victoria Street and around the corner. Not one customer who joins is surprised by the line and nobody gives up and leaves it. The effort it seems is clearly worth the reward. Gelato Messina is a Sydney institution.…

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Is Getting More Blog Traffic Really Your Goal?

As traditional marketing (read advertising) becomes less and less effective businesses are turning to content marketing. The metric of many content marketers, as it was of advertisers is still more. How can I get more traffic to my blog? How can we turn our unique visitors into pageviews? How can we get more Facebook likes,…

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Hope Is Not A Marketing Strategy

There’s a tiny market in Potts Point every Sunday. Each week the stallholders show up and hope. They hope that someone who might be their customer will show up too. The stallholders sell things that a passer-by might want, usually things that they could get somewhere else if they weren’t going to buy it on…

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Do It Like You Mean It

I’m not sure if it was the fact that she was reading a hardback book that made me notice the woman at the back of the cafe. When was the last time you saw someone reading a hardback book? When I asked her what she was reading, she flipped it over. Self help—2014 was going…

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Don’t Make Me Click, Make Me Care

There’s no denying it calls to action are important and increasingly so in a world of infinite choices. We have less and less time to give people a reason to choose us. Calls to action matter, not just because we want people to do what we want them to do when they visit our websites,…

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The Question Your Competitors Forgot To Ask

The foundation of many businesses is a simple what. What do we serve and sell, for how much, at what profit margin? Getting stuck in ‘the what’ puts you squarely in the commodities business. If the value you create is purely tangible then you’re not giving people a reason to care about your brand, or…

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The Real Reason The Microsoft Store Is Empty

Clues about what matters to people and how their emotions drive their choices are all around us and there’s no better time to see evidence of this in action than during the festive season. Slate recently posted two images that tell two very different brand stories. Both photos were taken on what should have been…

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