Competition is a fact of life.  Yet it’s amazing how few companies – especially small businesses – spend any time at all trying to understand their competition.  What little they do know is often anecdotal, and rarely objective.  But without accurate information about the other companies you’re competing with, it’s very tough to create and…

Last week, we talked about the law of physics that says an object at rest will remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force.  Here’s another marketing application.  Even if you’re not doing a great job, your customers will stick around out of inertia.  But let an outside force act on them –…

Conventional wisdom says that professionals should dress for the position they want rather than the position they have.  The same is true of your company.  There’s a great temptation, especially when your company is young or budgets are tight, to cut corners on the items that carry your brand out to the world: your website,…

An app for iPhone and Android relieves users of the need to sit and wait on hold for a customer service representative.  The creators of FastCustomer waited and chose options through hundreds of corporate phone trees, then built an app that navigates those treacherous waters automatically and gets you to a live person without the…

According to your high school physics teacher, an object at rest will remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force.  This has a couple corollaries in marketing.  Here’s one: if you can’t give people a reason to leave their current provider and choose you, inertia will keep them right where they are –…

In a recent interview, British singer Joss Stone noted that there are a lot of reasons to pursue a musical career, including money, fame and passion.  But the kicker was her conclusion: that every decision a musician makes is determined by his or her reason for becoming a musician in the first place.  In other…

Recently, a mom arriving late to an event offered the above by way of explanation.  In other words, she’s given up being on time, and has transformed her track record into a condition imposed on her by nature.  We do this in business all the time.  We set up artificial, non-existent limits on the way…

Because people are buried under information and messages from an expanding array of media, branding – making your company or product stand out from the rest –  is much harder than it used to be.  Yet very few businesses invest resources in developing a truly big idea – a message, position, product or benefit that…

How do you measure success?  Does everyone in your organization understand how you do it?  And are you measuring the right thing?  Take pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.  Sounds like the perfect marketing tool, right?  You don’t pay unless someone clicks on the ad, which lands them on your website.  But is that really success?  If a…

Everybody has one.  It’s the obstacle that keeps you from growing, or the challenge that prevents you from providing better service.  And the truth is, it’s almost always obvious to everyone.  What’s usually less obvious is the solution.  But ask yourself this: if you clearly identified the problem, then devoted the time and energy required…