ACTIVATION
The missing ingredient in your marketing mix?
ZeroN – Levitated Interaction Element
MIT creates amazing new UI
Confusion marketing is stupid marketing
What’s wrong with being straight with people? As if they appreciate being confused or misled! Doh!
If your customers are uncomfortable with the concept that you need to make a profit then you need new customers.
Everything in business has a cost associated with it.
Surprisingly, when you remind your clients that you need to make a profit they tend to jump to your defense. They seem almost embarrassed that they may have pushed you too hard on price.
Never fear being open about how you make your money. Transparency is appreciated by thinking people.
Leave the smoke and mirrors, sleights of hand and nasty surprises to others.
There’s nothing confusing about a great product or genuinely good deal.
The McElroy memo
May 13, 1931 Cincinnati. Neil H. McElroy makes his case for hiring additional marketing staff. In the process he redefines the discipline of brand management for ever.
Getting a good price in a chaotic marketplace
Sometime ago we started to receive emails from a supplier offering ridiculously low prices on certain products.
Month after month the emails kept coming, month after month their client list appeared to grow with the addition of yet more well known industry players.
How on earth were they doing it? What was their secret? A new model, an ingenious approach, brilliant sourcing from a virgin territory?
There was no secret. They went bust.
The problem was, during the period in which they traded, their activity caused a general dip in pricing across the industry because search engines delivered adverts featuring their products to large numbers of people.
There you have it! See all the people who complete polls saying they place service above price, well guess what, some of them lie.
Competition is the essence of trade. It’s how things get better. If you fear competition you ought to give business a wide berth. But business is about making money, not just once or twice or occasionally but every time.
There are no special tricks, secrets or clever work-arounds when it comes to profit. You buy it for 1 and sell it for 2. You maybe selling knowledge, you maybe selling boxes of stuff. Either way, profit is sanity, turnover is vanity – as the old saying goes.
Making money is hard to do, especially when the internet encourages people to make unfair comparisons or to be lured by false economies.
What irony. All this information, the speed, the convenience and yet it’s never been harder to know if you’re getting a genuinely good deal.
We believe that the best value is to be found in strong commercial relationships where both parties display loyalty and a desire to improve.
Having lots of suppliers and spending hours trawling the net for a better price certainly does come at a “good price”!
Death by stars
‘Star ratings’ are meant to provide a simple, quick and honest measure of what’s good and what isn’t.
From books to music, hotels to footwear, you name it and someone has rated it. But just who was that ‘someone’? and how can we be sure their opinion was unbiased or fair?
You see, the problem is that just about anyone can say anything about everything nowadays. Sounds cool right? All that freedom of speech, all that transparency, all that democracy.
Well in theory the information free-for-all we call the internet is a wonderful thing.
Unless that is you’re a small family hotel picking up the pieces having watched your business being destroyed by the inaccurate rantings of a couple mad anoraks with nothing better to do!
Just how many terrible tracks have been lauded by a seemingly ecstatic fan who bares a striking resemblance to the PR junior in the record company’s A&R dept. And how many marvelous book reviews have been written by the publisher?
On-line, all is almost certainly, not what it seems.
So maybe the star rating system is a relic of the early internet. Maybe reviews and comment should only be considered if made by someone you know or have reason to trust.
Just as voters have become disillusioned with politicians, savers with banks and readers with journalists, it’s probably the case that users are beginning to take the impartiality of star ratings, along with unsolicited comments and reviews with a large pinch of salt.
Is “chaos” the new evil empire?
