Pages

The “Down Sell”

BNET posted an article by Jeremy Quittner suggesting a new strategy. We are very familiar with “up-selling”, the practice of giving a product premium characteristics and a premium price too. There are success stories of luxury brands that began as basics all over the place. Think of what Starbucks has done to the 50-cent cup [...]

Cameron and Jobs: Passionate Leadership

To celebrate the release of Avatar on DVD we thought we would share some similarities offered by BNET of two innovative leaders by looking at traits which produce incredible innovation. In fact, following any of these styles could get you fired — unless you have the inspiration genius that can deliver results like Cameron and [...]

Courting a Wary Customer

Deliver Magazine and Sid Liebenson suggest three ways to build and maintain loyal relationships when customers are running scared.

Consumers are retrenching, economizing and just plain scared. But as the saying goes, the pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity, and the optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.

The recession presents the perfect opportunity to finetune your marketing [...]

Restore Old Customers

Traditional customer re-activation strategies are struggling to deliver the results they once did. This has been fueled by cuts in consumer spending and communication channel fragmentation, forcing marketers to develop new approaches. A Target Marketing Magazine article told the stories of innovators who are leveraging customer data, analytical tools and new customer touchpoints to fuel [...]

Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy

This is classic business strategy information. We thought you would appreciate an opportunity to think about competition and profitability in different ways.

The Harvard Business Review is selling an article by Michael E. Porter that updates a 1979 article.

The article suggests that to sustain long-term profitability you must respond strategically to competition. Naturally you keep tabs [...]

Low Cost Publicity Tips & Ideas

You want to stretch every marketing dollar right now! If you decide to promote your own company here are ten ideas and tactics to get you started. We saved the traditional ideas for last.

Network! Join groups and talk to people.
Start a newsletter. This implies you have a mailing list. If you don’t have one, start [...]

Do You Need All That Data?

Just in case we get lost in over-analyzing everything, including customer data, Ron Ashkenas suggested that we step back and think about what is really useful in a post for the Harvard Business Review.

Organizations love data: numbers, reports, trend lines, graphs, spreadsheets — the more the better. And, as a result, many organizations have a [...]

Scrubbing Data

Deliver Magazine reported that despite the ROI potential from data hygiene, many companies still haven’t cleaned up their lists.

Data management is still a hot topic for many companies these days. Marketers too often focus on how best to use the data rather than spending enough time wondering whether the data itself is clean. Good data [...]

Another Reason for List Hygiene

Deliver Magazine told of a valid reason to regularly scrub mailing lists. Sure, mailings sent to the deceased get responses — but they’re usually from distressed family members commenting on how disrespectful and downright rude the company is for sending it in the first place.

“Not only is this a waste of a company’s time and [...]

Customer Data Best Practices

The Aberdeen Group published a report in December, 2009 that explored customer database practices to reveal how organizations are capturing, storing, analyzing and acting on customer data.

The Best Performing Organizations:

Currently achieve 163% mean class Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI); 9% average year over year growth in ROMI
51% year over year mean class growth in revenue

The [...]