What Focus Groups Can’t Tell You

Steve Jobs famously said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” The committee might be able to tell you what they think is working, or what’s broken, but they can’t tell you how to matter. And no…

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What Do Your Customers Care About?

Let’s look at some cold, hard, and fun facts. A search on Instagram one morning in mid-September for #me, gave me over 123 million results. Just 18 hours later a further 466,000 had been added. Let’s round that up to half a million a day, which means 26,000 photos with the hashtag ‘me’ are uploaded…

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The Elephant In The Marketing Room

“Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think” —Jill Bolte Taylor I was raised in Dublin, the storytelling capital of the world. There is no place on earth that is more hardwired for story than Ireland, home of Guinness and oversize teapots. Wikipedia…

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What People Want Then And Now

In the 70s and 80s you didn’t download music you owned it. If you cared enough about an artist or a song you had to wait for the vinyl to be pressed. Sometimes you waited in line hoping that EMI or Sony had sent enough copies to your local store. There you met other fans,…

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10 Things That Work Better Than SEO In The Connection Economy

A decade ago if you owned the URL wineseller.com and stuffed your website full of keywords you’d won. You can’t earn loyalty in a category today simply by gaming Google because your customers are searching for relevance not just keywords. Ten things to think about beyond SEO. 1. Build a brand not just a business.…

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Sales Is…..

sales noun 1. The exchange of a commodity for money; the action of selling something. 2. A quantity or amount sold. Actually sales is understanding how your customer wants to feel, not what she wants to buy and doing everything you can to get her there. Image by Ed Yourdon.

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Winning In The Story Economy

Back to my hair salon. Sally shows up on time. She gets through two colours and three trims buy lunch, then waits impatiently for the hands on the clock to turn the next four hours until closing. Carmel makes five minutes to chat to the pensioner who took two buses to get there. She remembers…

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Brand Vs. Branding

Branding is….. “The process involved in creating a unique name and image for a product in the consumers’ mind, mainly through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme.” —The Business Directory Branding in the traditional sense was designed to create recognition and awareness of commodities. It was the way business persuaded customers to decide. There’s a…

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Crafting Your Intention

I met a really passionate financial planner recently who was a bit stuck about how to craft a 30 second pitch to deliver to the people he met at networking events. The problem was that while he was agonising over finding the right words he lost the ability to communicate his intention. If you have…

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The Hard Part

The hard part of becoming a personal trainer isn’t learning which muscle does what. There are plenty of study guides and anatomy books to help an aspiring trainer to get a Certificate IV in Fitness. No, the hard part is the art of telling a story that people you hope will sign up for your…

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