Companies often look to the stars in their own industries to identify best practices or innovations they can adopt for their own growth.  But adaptation – looking at the ways in which companies or industries outside your own have solved problems or created opportunities, then adapting those ideas to your own business – can yield…

Great ideas are vital for growing a company.  But ask anyone who seems to have a lot of good ideas – for books, for products, for ads, for anything – and they’ll tell you that their bad ideas far outnumber the good ones.  The only sure way to develop good ideas for your business is…

Most companies have a certain kind of customer they want to attract: frequent buyers or those who tend to make big ticket purchases.  These customers are often more sophisticated when it comes to your business.  Yet most of the time, marketing material is targeted to those with only the most basic grasp of what you…

It seems so.  More and more businesses are providing ways for customers to post reviews of their products and services online for other customers to read.  The downside, of course, is that someone will take you to task online for some failure to deliver as promised.  But research suggests that if most reviews are positive,…

In a world where communication increasingly travels via Twitter and Facebook with their built-in limits on the number of characters you can use, people are slowly being conditioned to sending and receiving more succinct messages.  What role should this shift be playing in your overall marketing?

A recent study showed that the majority of adults rarely or never switch brands based solely on advertising.  No surprises there – compelling consumers to change requires much more than an ad campaign.  There was one surprise in the study, though.  Young people ages 18 – 35, though often assumed to be immune to the…

When companies are successful, they develop a natural trust in their own judgment – a trust that leads them to discount or dismiss advice and ideas from outside the inner circle.  But things change, and the very ideas and strategies that brought initial – or even prolonged – success in the past may hinder future…

We often assume that when it comes to serving customers, the more choices we offer, the better.  But studies show that having too many options can cause consumers to choose nothing at all.  For example, a study of 401k plans found that as the number of investment choices in a plan rise, participation falls.  If…

Companies often fail at the simple task of watching how customers use (or don’t use) their products and services.  Yet there’s money to be made by paying attention.  Just ask Heinz, whose observations of children using ketchup led them to develop a smaller bottle that’s easier for kids to handle.  The result?  In homes where…

Research firms often ask consumers how they would behave or what they would prefer under a given set of circumstances.  The problem lies in asking us what we believe we would do – because we’re rarely accurate in predicting our own behavior.  We’re often simply wrong, or we’re misled by good intentions that have little…