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Tag Archive for Marketing Strategy

06 Apr 2011

Standing Out is One Way to Increase Margins

BNET recently posted a story about the success of Crumbs Bakery in New York City. The article is titled, “Startup Survival: How to Get Past the 3-Year Hump,” the point being that smart marketing makes for financial success.

The rational way to raise your gross margin is to differentiate your business by redefining your company as the only player in a specific niche, instead of being just another company among larger ones. Crumbs has distinguished itself by selling the world’s best cupcake. It leads with cupcakes, reserves the best merchandising space for cupcakes and displays cupcakes above the fold on its website.

If your company is the only one that can do what you do, then you can increase your margins. How can we help you solidify the idea that you are the only one who can do what you do?

Catherine | No comments | Tags: Marketing Strategy

23 Mar 2011

Marketing Strategy

Pricing Strategy

The Harvard Business Review’s Daily Stat reminds us why pricing is so important. The McKinsey Quarterly found a company that was selling an industrial piece of equipment with a net margin of -200%.

Long Term Pricing Strategy

The lesson is that we should price products or services across the product life cycle. The example of the negative net margin occurred because an industrial-equipment manufacturer spread its costs across all products. They were deceived to believe that they were making a reasonable margin on older products. However, a closer examination of expenses of each product phase showed that older products cost substantially more to produce than it had expected.

Catherine | No comments | Tags: Harvard Business Publishing, Marketing Strategy

02 Mar 2011

Advertising • Marketing Strategy

Tools to Stand Out

BNET shared some stories about marketing tactics that independent bookstores are using to remain successful.

Expand your reach to a national market.
Go green.
Create a store within a store.
Open your doors to the community.
Cultivate the next generation of customers.
Get social.

One or more of these ideas could work for your business. We would love to help you implement them and put together a story to tell your customers about it. Maybe it is just the reason you have needed to mail a postcard out to your favorite customers?

Catherine | No comments | Tags: customer retention, Innovation, Maintain Customer Relationship, Marketing Strategy, Minimize Costs, Tough Times Marketing

31 Jan 2011

Buying Behavior

Is It The End of the Marketing Funnel

Marketing has grown more complicated, media choices have exploded, and consumers have asserted themselves more visibly than ever before. So perhaps some of the classical ways to understand and visualize marketing concepts, need to change and evolve too.

Forbes.com shared some information from Forrester that found that 53% of U.S. online consumers research products online that they’ll then purchase in the store. This process exposes consumers to brands they might not have previously considered, expanding their consideration set at exactly the point where, according to the traditional funnel, it should narrow.

The author, Forester analyst, Steve Noble proposes to bury the marketing funnel and introduce a new model–the customer life cycle.

Discover: Every customer must discover a brand, product category, or personal need–the initial trigger that leads to a new or repeat purchase.

Explore: In this phase, customers explore the brand–and their options. When visiting an online store or handling products in a well-crafted shop environment, customers are immersing themselves in the explore phase.

Buy: Customer experiences during this phase include product availability, inventory lookup, and satisfaction with the checkout process. It also includes the actual price paid, the perceived value, and the experience with the sales channel if there is a problem.

Engage: After buying a product or service, customers engage with brands in several ways.

We reported on the evolution of the way people make buying decisions based on some data from McKinsey. That study found that “traditional” marketing was still a very important part of the buying process, it just happened earlier. This latest information from Forrester Research also supports the important role that direct mail can play in the buying process, during the discovery and engagement phases.

Catherine | No comments | Tags: Brand Awareness, Consumer Buying Behavior, Customer Characteristics, Maintain Customer Relationship, Marketing Strategy

20 Jan 2011

Business • Buying Behavior

Engagement and Motivation, Illustrated

The Harvard Business Review’s Peter Bregman told a story of cooking with farm fresh produce in a blog post titled, The Farm-to-Table Secret to Motivating People.

He told of how having the experience of a few days at a farm with his family connected him in unexpected ways to food and led to him feeling very inspired to create some complex food with the produce they brought home. The conclusion he reached was that the earlier and sooner people get involved in a process, the more they become connected to it.

You want to try a new sales process? Don’t figure it all out yourself and then tell your sales people about it. Let them figure it out with you.

Want customers to buy your service or product? Involve them in the creation of it. They feel something deeper than the success of a project gone well. They feel pride of ownership. They feel satisfied by the journey that brought them to their success.

Catherine | 3 comments | Tags: Business Strategy, Harvard Business Publishing, Marketing Strategy

14 Jan 2011

Advertising • Design

Lessons Learned from The Gap’s Attempted Logo Change

BNET recently discussed The Gap’s logo change and the quick abandonment for something that looks much more like the original.

These ideas could share some new insights about brand management.

Consumers own brands. Your brand does not have any value until it is valued by your customers. You might feel your business needs to be rebranded or relaunched, but your opinions are irrelevant: You work for the company. You’re so “inside” you can’t see outside. Proceed with caution!
Consumers are savvy about design in just the same way as they are about media and advertising. The 21st Century has really stripped the mystery from design and advertising. Most consumers have better software on their laptops today than professional designers had on their desktops 20 years ago.
As a result, consumers expect more from professional design. One of the main problems with the Gap’s new logo is that it used a typeface — Helvetica — which everyone has available on their own computers. Similarly, the graduated blue box is also something that virtually everyone can do after just a few minutes fooling around on the most basic graphic design software. This left Gap open to the legit accusation, “My kid could do that!” Redesigns need to be a lot more subtle and complex — even if the aim is to to be simple and clean — than they used to be.
The move saves Gap some money. Changing back its web site is a lot easier than changing back all its store interiors, point-of-purchase material, catalogs, etc.
The change removes uncertainty from the brand. Gap could probably have gotten away with keeping the new logo. Fashion and product trends drive Gap’s business, not typefaces. Most people didn’t even know the logo had changed. With the blue box back on its throne, the risk goes away.

So perhaps your website is a good place to test new design ideas. Can we help you before you go to press with a new idea?

Catherine | No comments | Tags: Advertising, Brand Awareness, Consumer Buying Behavior, Design, Internet Marketing, Marketing Strategy

12 Jan 2011

Advertising • Marketing Plan

71 Percent of Tweets are Ignored

Wired.com reported on the findings of an analysis of 1.2 billion messages sent in 2009, seven out of every ten Twitter messages get absolutely no reaction.

We just completed a marketing outlook survey for the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Council that seemed to leave out many aspects of “traditional” marketing.

So the question is if numbers and results are revealing that email open rates are 22% and click through rates are about 5%, why do these and other marketing methods get so much attention?

Catherine | One comment | Tags: Advertising, Internet Marketing, Marketing Strategy

07 Jan 2011

Marketing Strategy

Digital Information May Prevent Absorption

Technology may make the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

The New York Times published an article summarizing the findings from research conducted at the University of California, San Francisco. They concluded that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn. “Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued. “People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

Our conclusion is that this is bad for marketing too. If the only way people encounter your name or branding is digitally, they may not be absorbing the communication. We have shared information about how paper can make better emotional connections, and how touching, feeling and engaging in an activity like doodling can help retain information.

Catherine | One comment | Tags: Advertising, Internet Marketing, Marketing Strategy

29 Nov 2010

Advertising

More WOW! Numbers

“55 Percent of Survey Respondents Cannot Effectively Measure Marketing ROI of Mobile, Social Media and Video,” this is the recent context of press release from Omniture. Omniture perceives this as an opportunity.

We reported on the results from a different study from R2integrated that found that 65% of companies had not increased revenue or profited using social media.

Is this really opportunity, or this an opportunity to reevaluate the great hope that new media would be the key to increased revenue?

Let us help you explore if a direct mailing campaign will help you grow your revenue.

Catherine | No comments | Tags: Email, Internet Marketing, Marketing Strategy, return on investment

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