Few companies find the time to look down the road and ask critical questions about the future of their industry.  If, for example, you’re a homebuilder, how does the mortgage crisis, the recession and the perception that many communities are overbuilt affect your next decade or two?  If you’re a banker, how long will it…

In a lot of industries, buyers love the product but hate the process.  Think about buying a car or applying for a mortgage loan as examples.  Imagine if the buyer could love both product AND process.  Here’s an example.  Buy something at an Apple Store, and you’ll probably never see a cash register.  Your Apple…

Companies often market as though the buyer always makes a purchasing decision in the same way.  But buyers change all the time – and smart brands are what change them, by changing the game.  Just think about all the ways Apple has changed music buyers, phone buyers and computer buyers.  It’s worth thinking about –…

Too often in marketing, companies focus only on short term results.  This is especially true in a sluggish economy.  But consider this.  In the 1960s, a researcher famously placed a marshmallow in front of each child in a group of four-year-olds.  You can have it now, they were told, or wait a short while and…

If you or your people are in sales, you know that you can’t win them all.  Rejection is a fact of life.  But how you handle the loss of a sale has a lot to do with what happens next.  We’ve actually seen salespeople get upset with prospects and try to “argue” them into changing…

Mark Twain observed, “There’s no such thing as a new idea…We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.  We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.”  Here’s an example.  Crystal Martin took the idea of a brochure and the idea of those…

Now that a gazillion people are tweeting, the big question becomes: who’s following them all?  A lot of people seem to be approaching Twitter as though volume was all that mattered.  They follow thousands of people, knowing that many of those thousands will return the favor.  But are they truly “followers?”  If you’re following 10,000…

So many companies talk about exceeding customers’ expectations that it leads you to wonder if they really know what customers expect.  If they do, how did they find out?  Surveys?  Focus groups?  And if they know, how do they measure their performance against those expectations so they can support their claims, or at least have…

Pop singer (and avid runner) Ellie Goulding understands marketing.  Her “Lights” CD includes a slip of paper that, on one side, invites you to visit her website and sign up to run with the singer when she visits your town.  The Nike swoosh suggests that the sports apparel giant is a sponsor.  The back of…

Many, many products or services come with a catch – some step or feature that’s inconvenient for the user but unavoidable in the eyes of the seller.  A necessary evil.  But look around at the most successful companies.  They decided that if they worked hard enough or thought about it long enough, they could ditch…