Here’s a secret: no one likes to be called a “vendor.”  If you want to see a big change in your business, make an effort to drop the word from your vocabulary (and from your perspective) and replace it with “partner.”  Here’s the difference.  Vendors work for you.  Partners work with you.  Vendors see an…

So many businesses are looking for the one thing they can do that will effectively market their goods or services.  There’s just one problem; it doesn’t exist.  Now more than ever, marketing is about doing a lot of things at once, and doing them all well.  The time when one medium or approach trumped all…

There are plenty of best-of lists out there.  But the top of the list of worst marketing mistakes you can make?  Doing nothing.  Basing your continued success on the idea that you can abstain from marketing for any period of time is like jumping off a cliff.  There’s just no happy ending.  Unless you offer…

For many companies, especially in service industries like finance and medicine, the marketing tool most heavily relied on is inertia.  These companies know that switching providers is a monumental pain, so they count on that to overcome any pain their customers may be feeling from lackluster service, rising charges or just plain being ignored.  But…

Remember the Pepsi Challenge?  Consumers in a blind taste test were asked to sample Coke and Pepsi.  The majority preferred Pepsi.  Yet Coke outsells Pepsi.  How is this possible?  Yes, Coke has a lock on fountain sales in fast food behemoths like McDonald’s, and is relentless in getting its vending machines exclusive space in shopping…

Most customers don’t like to complain.  And most companies don’t handle complaints well.  That’s a bad combination.  Too often, a customer has to endure a long, involved process just to get what he or she should have gotten in the first place.  The goal in handling a complaint shouldn’t be to give customers what they…

You can spend a lot of money on books that promote the idea of letting your users come up with your next innovation.  The problem is that it almost never happens in real life.  Users may find a new use for something you offer, but seldom if ever come up with truly new (and profitable)…

You probably see one every day: a billboard that gets seen daily by thousands, but has such a lame message or bad design that it either does nothing at all or actually undercuts the brand.  There are examples in every medium, including all the social media, but the point remains the same: exposure doesn’t necessarily…

If you’re looking for a marketing role model, you’ll find one in fictional DC icon Batman.  Unlike Superman, who’s blessed with powers that make him pretty hard to beat, Batman is an ordinary guy.  What makes him succeed — and what your marketing should reflect — is the Dark Knight’s fanatical devotion to the brand…

The HGTV series “Holmes on Homes” revolves around burly contractor Mike Holmes, who’s called in to fix shoddy work left behind by his less reliable colleagues.  As egregious as many of the botched jobs are, what’s even more astonishing is that a TV series relies entirely on an endless supply of inept contractors for content. …