Supposedly stodgy retailer JCPenney is light years ahead of the competition when it comes to internet sales.  The number of paying customers who shop its website (nearly a million in the last quarter alone) place the company among the top five retail sites, shoulder to shoulder with eBay and Amazon.com.  Why?  Because the chain thinks…

How do bands like the Police and the Stones get away with selling premium tickets for hundreds of dollars?  It’s not the view;  the giant screens that flanks the stage let even the cheap seats see the action.  For most concertgoers, it’s the experience – being able to say they saw Buffett or Bono from…

The Census Bureau reports a surprising trend: about 20% of those who moved south at retirement are returning to their hometown.  In fact, during a recent 5-year stretch, more than a third of older folks who moved to Pittsburgh were coming back from Florida.  This suggests opportunities for certain kinds of companies as the boomers…

When consumers were asked about what influences them to buy, the results were almost shockingly skewed away from traditional advertising.  Over half of all repondents identified friends or family as having an impact on purchasing decisions, while just 10% felt ads in traditional media influenced them.  While consumers can be notoriously inaccurate about their own…

Just about every job description calls for “excellent communication skills” – i.e., clarity.   But this quality can be painfully absent from two key places.  In marketing, companies often describe what they do and why they’re the best in such vague terms that you can read an entire brochure and still not know exactly what…

Branding involves a lot of things.  But great branding is anchored by consistency in every area, including the way your company is presented to prospects.  If you took the average company, and looked at its business cards, brochures, website, signs and advertising, how much commonality do you think you’d find?  The answer, in the vast…

Sometimes, it pays to let your prospects do your thinking for you.  Too often, we want to spell out exactly what we can offer and how.  But there’s a problem with that strategy.  If a prospect encounters your ad (or billboard or radio spot or direct mail piece) and gets the point right away, he…

Sometimes, it pays to let your prospects do your thinking for you.  Too often, we want to spell out exactly what we can offer and how.  But there’s a problem with that strategy.  If a prospect encounters your ad (or billboard or radio spot or direct mail piece) and gets the point right away, he…

Here’s one simple fact that hasn’t changed: businesses get few referrals from existing clients because – wait for it – they don’t ask for them.  There’s a boatload of evidence that suggests we’re too shy about asking the people who already do business with us to send a friend our way.  If you’re a B2B…

One of the greatest temptations of the corner office is to assume that you know your customers.  Business changes.  People change.  Tastes change.  Habits change.  And the rate of change in all areas is accelerating.  So if you’re basing your marketing decisions on assumptions grounded in the reality of five or ten years ago, there’s…