Closely related to reputation, credibility is at the heart of business success. Even if you havae a great product or service, if you have no credibility, you don’t have much. This issue came to mind when I received a newsletter from a potential supplier recently. It contained a statistic that I made me stop and…
“Our website is just not creative enough,” lamented a new client recently. “It’s stale and lacks spark,” she said. “Can you help us?” While creativity is a relatively important aspect of all marketing collateral, in and of itself, creativity is highly overrated. Jay Conrad Levinson, the author of Guerrilla Marketing, says “creativity should be measured…
You know those stories and lessons you learned from your parents that have always been with you? That little voice in your head that says, “you are in control of you, nothing else,” or “you always have a choice, you might as well make it a good one.” Well, education doesn’t always flow downhill. One…
A few days ago, we pulled into Costco to “pick up a couple of things.” You know how that goes. Three hundred bucks, two shopping carts and a hernia later, we load up the car and head home. The kid inside me was anxious to get there because we had picked up a treat—chocolate milk.…
Imagine having customers so loyal that they tattoo your logo on their arms. That’s the kind of brand awareness—and loyalty—Harley-Davidson enjoys. So, imagine the eye-popping that went on when H-D discovered that its fastest-growing market was. . . women! The marketing department immediately started making plans to invest heavily to secure that market. Why would…
If you think people are listening to you with only their ears, you know only half the story. Want to be more influential and better understood? Then be aware that you also “speak” with your body. Non-verbal communications include the look on your face, eye contact, your posture, how close you are to the person…
Who doesn’t love a good statistic? Reading them can be interesting and using them can make us sound knowledgeable. Here are a few random statistics you might enjoy. . . Using videos on your product pages will increase sales, on average, by 43.7%. Eye-tracking studies show that your website has less than four seconds to…
Your business, whether you like it or not, is more than just an enterprise. It is a living, breathing citizen of our community. It gives and it takes—just like real people. It pays taxes to and benefits from local government—just like real people. And, just like people, businesses have certain responsibilities within a community. They…
