Those fun folks at the Stanford Graduate School of Business spent a few gazillion hours poring over 2,600 blogs, and discovered at least one big difference between baby boomers and their younger counterparts.  Contrary to popular opinion, the boomers don’t want to be twenty again, nor are they adrenaline junkies.  Blog entries by the over-50…

An executive was recently quoted as saying, “More than eight million people will own iPads by the end of the year. It’s the fastest-selling gadget ever and it’s the most exciting thing to happen to the magazine market in a long time.”  The twist?  This was not a magazine industry insider, but an executive at…

Many firms, ours included, preach the importance of creating online content to keep customers and prospects engaged.  But it pays to remember that engagement is only part of the goal.  You want prospects to be active, not passive, communicating and even collaborating rather than just cruising through.  So as your digital strategy continues to evolve,…

According to one AT&T rep, the most you should hope for from their DSL service is 80% of the maximum speed you’re paying for.  That’s the level of service they’re content with.  The problem is, businesses never improve by aiming low.  If you’re happy with 80% customer satisfaction, that’s what you’ll get (if you’re lucky),…

Fast food restaurant Chick-fil-A continues to prosper by following its own rules.  Because the company is privately held, there’s no need to dance to the siren song of quarterly growth figures.  So the company keeps new products to a minimum, focuses on its core menu items, remains closed on Sundays – and keeps generating profits. …

Can you expand your business by shrinking your pool of prospects?  You bet.  If you have a particular type of customer who is more profitable, why not position your company as one who caters exclusively to that type of customer?  Fifty years ago, a laundry service had grown beyond its ability to keep up.  The…

Everyone knows that some customers are more profitable than others.  But what about those customers who might be profitable, but are simply awful people?  Everyone dreads their calls and visits, their scowls and surliness, the unreasonable demands and perpetual dissatisfaction.  Yes, they make you money, but at what cost to morale?  And here’s the difficult…

Do you know your competitors?  All of them?  The big pizza chains would never have thought of Kraft Foods as a significant competitor, yet, as we mentioned last week, much of the sales success of Kraft’s DiGiorno frozen pizza came at the expense of franchises like Pizza Hut, Domino’s and Papa John’s.  Take a good…

It’s well-known but often overlooked that it’s less expensive to gain new relationships with existing customers than to attract new customers.  With today’s technology, that means tracking customer purchasing patterns and activity using CRM software, using the results to identify their unmet needs, then actively promoting your solutions to those needs directly to customers.  But…

When Kraft Foods introduced DiGiorno Pizza, it knew what it was up against.  It already had its Tombstone and Jack’s frozen pizza lines, and research showed that people firmly believed that frozen pizza was vastly inferior to carry out and delivery (CO/D).  Kraft made at least three smart moves with DiGiorno.  First, it started with…