While many people like to wear clothing bearing their favorite designer insignia, upscale designers have increasingly left the logo behind, choosing more subtle touches for their signature.  A flash of cheetah print lining signals a Dolce & Gabbana jacket.  The tiny padlock lets you know it’s a Chloé Paddington satchel.  That red sole is the…

While blogging continues to gain in popularity, its growth is being outpaced by its evil twin, spam blogging, or splogging.  These fake blogs, typically written by software designed for this purpose, simply pack likely keywords and stolen copy into their content to snag the attention of search engines, then load up with pay-per-click ads.  By…

Most professionals wouldn’t complement their best suit with a stained tie, or a favorite skirt with scruffy shoes.  Yet businesses often take this approach with the company image.  They invest more in the marketing items they believe to be most important, but little or nothing on those they feel are “less important.”  They may have…

Social networking sites like MySpace (with its millions of inhabitants) and Facebook often give employees a place to complain about their employers.  But some companies are now using those same sites to learn more about prospective hires.  If you’re ready to bring a new person on board, then you find that they’ve posted rabid online…

London-based HSBC, a global banking company with offices in 79 countries, decided to live up to its slogan, “the world’s local bank.”  It began with a search for “the most knowledgeable cab driver in New York,” then sent him out in a classic yellow Checker cab nicknamed the Bankcab to patrol the Big Apple and…

Brand-building is a time-honored discipline.  A hundred years before celebrity endorsements and naming rights for performance venues became commonplace, they were already being used by piano makers Steinway & Sons.  Steinway Hall in New York housed the New York Philharmonic for a quarter of a century.  And while everyone from Franz Liszt to Cole Porter…

A proven key to growth in any business is sales training.  But most companies are so busy selling, they fail to find time to provide themselves or their salespeople with training.  If you’re beginning to plan now for 2007 (you are planning, aren’t you?), keep these three criteria in mind.  Effective sales training is ongoing…

Everyone knows the 80/20 rule: 80% of your business is generated by 20% of your customers, and the remaining 20% of your business comes from the other 80% of your customers.  But in a lot of businesses, the least productive customers take just as much (or more) customer service time as your best customers.  When…

Here are two critical things you should know about your business.  First, what percentage of customers or clients defect every year?  This tells you how much new business you need each year simply to stay where you are.  Second, why did they leave?  Are there changes you can make to prevent further defections?  If the…

Instead of being a mediocre magician (which he was), Harry Houdini decided to become something new – an escape artist. No one would have guessed that audiences would sit for ninety minutes or more while someone they couldn’t see tried to get out of a box.  But they did, and Harry became more famous than…