Marketing is measurement, is marketing.
Most of the best marketers I have worked with had a common strand of DNA. They were professionally trained, and came to marketing via their science, engineering, or maths training, for a variety of reasons. Took me a long time to figure it out, but the light dawned...
Marketing Mediocrity (sic, crap)
In this time of marketing abundance, huge opportunity to connect with consumers, understand their behavior and its drivers, both physical and psychological, not just the demographics of big groups who fall within arbitrarily nominated boundaries, why is the general...
Unplug, or just get some balance.
Yesterday walking to a train station in an unfamiliar part of Sydney, I asked directions of a "40-ish" bloke, making the mistake of not realising he had the plugs in, and was completely unaware of anything around him, including me. Once he did I was subjected to an...
Top 11 tasks for Small businesses.
As I talk to small businesses, there is a very common set of things they should all be doing, remarkably common. So here they are: Doing what they currently do 10% better. Even if what they are doing is sub-optimal, doing it cheaper, faster, better, must be of...
Fire yourself.
Small business owners work harder, and often take home less than their employed peers. I see this all the time, again and again, in all sorts of contexts. Ever wondered why? In my experience, most go into business because they have great skill, contacts, and...
“Generosity” management
For a long time now I have advocated the notion that to get something back, you first need to put something in. Time, effort, knowledge, care, whatever. What you put in is less important that that simple act of being generous, and contributing. It has always seemed to...
Real entrepreneurs never come.
Public programs are great, they redistribute the largess of success to the less successful or fortunate via taxes. Every civilised society has some, of varying value, but necessary none the less. Public entrepreneurial programs are a bit different, despite the best...
Mass advertising to direct response.
To talk to consumers, you used to stick an ad on TV, in one of the main mags, on maybe a few radio stations, a shotgun effort informed by some pretty rudimentary demographic data. Then we migrated to the web, in the late 90's, and advertisers transferred the...
Unheralded visionaries unite.
Very few people have heard of Douglas Engelbart, who died on July 4, but it was he that thought up much of the stuff we accept as normal, every day tools and devices. His relative obscurity is in stark contrast to the billionaires who brought commercial success to...
Be proud of price
Price is always a sticky subject. In most cases, sales people have been trained to slide over answering the inevitable, and often first question about price, until the value of the sales proposition has been established with the potential buyer. That is the way it...