Imperative 6: Keep the Word Use Clear and Clean It may seem silly even to mention that your marketing-material should be well-written. Naturally, you think. Why state the obvious? But remarkably, most marketing-material is pretty bad. I’m not just referring to copy that small businesses with small budgets create; I mean everyone! The language wanders, [...]
Imperative 5: Use a Catch-and-Keep Approach A recent study led by Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, revealed a startling fact: the average person takes fifty milliseconds-that’s less time than it takes you to blink your eye-to form an opinion about a website. That’s an impression that sticks. The study said there’s a “halo effect” where [...]
Imperative 4: Accentuate the Customer Benefits In Imperative 3, I said your marketing effort must focus on the customers. Let’s add a caveat to that idea: it must focus on how they’ll benefit from your offering. Think about the old customer service concept. Sure, the customer service reps will help you every time you walk [...]
Imperative 3: Focus On the Customer-Not You, Your Business, Your Employees, or Anything Else Your customers don’t care about you. Or your employees. Or your business philosophy. Not even how many years you’ve been around. What they do care about is how all these matters affect them-what we call the customer-focus. Segnala presso:
Imperative 2: Use Marketing Smarts! Business owners often produce marketing-material simply because everyone else does. Resist this impulse! Be smart about what you produce and how much time you devote to developing new material. Here are some pointers that will help: Segnala presso:
Imperative 1: It Should Be Useful! Think of all the business cards you’ve received in your life. How many are there? Hundreds? Thousands? Now, think of all the cards you have scanned in your computer. Filed in your Rolodex. Kept anywhere in your office. How many is that? Twenty? Thirty? Less? And the brochures? How [...]
If you’re going to have a marketing campaign, you must have marketing materials. Everyone knows this, but judging by the quality of marketing material out there, you’d think no one was paying attention. I mean, some of the stuff-actually, most of it-is bad. This, by the way, is great news for you. Your marketing material [...]
What This Means to You While branding has been an incredibly effective tool to communicate with people, it has evolved to the point that, often, the conversation between a company and its customers is a one-way monolog controlled by the company. Customers are given no choice but to listen to these one-sided conversations happening all [...]
The End of Branding as We Know it People today expect the ability to co-create and lead innovation, forcing companies to devise creative solutions to be competitive in this new, bottom-up age. Such an environment creates opportunities for companies who are creative and intimately listen to the cultures with which they are involved-joining forces with [...]
Case Study: The Fashion Industry The fashion industry is an interesting example of a business that has relied heavily on branding-how much more functionality can a $1,500 shirt have than a $15 shirt?-to gain revenue and profitability. So what has happened to the fashion industry, among the largest employers in New York City? Somehow, fashion [...]
