Jeanette Maw McMurtry

Article / Updated 07-10-2023

The two biggest e‐commerce outlets are of course Amazon and eBay, and both are great for marketing your products to the masses. But they’re different. Amazon offers you a retail structure and will often fulfill your sales as well as offer your products on its site for a fee. eBay is mostly a marketplace provider and offers you the tools to help you better promote your products to its site visitors. With both sites, you have access to a lot of shoppers, while of course having to overcome a lot of competition. For example, Amazon eBay Active users 244 million 157 million Annual income 2014 $88.9 billion $17.94 billion Number of independent sellers 2 million 25 million Number of products available 480 million 1 billion As you can see, a lot of selling takes place on these sites, and your product will be one of dozens, or rather nearly 1 billion if you choose eBay. However, it often pays off. For Amazon, some merchants report that their sales went up when selling on Amazon and that the volume of sales outweighed the costs of selling fees. So the question: to eBay or to Amazon? The main differences eBay offers are really quite simple: The atmosphere is different. It’s more of a market for individuals to list and sell personal goods at discount. eBay doesn’t offer to take inventory of your goods and sell them for you as Amazon will. eBay provides you with guidelines and tools for selling your items successfully, but you do the rest. With Amazon, you can sell your products with Amazon.com as the payment processing system for your shopping cart or Amazon’s; or you can become an Amazon seller, paying a monthly fee for Amazon to list and fulfill your product. The selling fees are lower with eBay; so, too, is the volume. Consumer perception is that eBay is like a big garage sale with a few new items mixed in, and Amazon is a trusted brand with everything new and trendy and easily returnable. Regardless of where you sell your products, the key is to get your product to pop up on the first page or two of the search results. Here are some tips that can help you get noticed. List your product in two categories. Some customers may not know which category to search in, so list your products in the categories that make sense. For example, if you’re selling a winter coat, list it as a jacket and a winter sports coat and see what happens. You should be able to track which listing made it to the shopping cart as well. It may cost more to do this, but if you don’t get noticed, you don’t get sales. Offer free shipping. eBay prefers listings with free shipping and gives them preference in its rank ordering of search results. Amazon offers free shipping to Prime customers, so it’s becoming more and more expected. If you offer free shipping, make sure you cover at least the cost of standard shipping in the overall price you list. Avoid keyword spamming. Keyword spamming is when you slip a popular keyword into your item description that doesn’t really belong there. For example, saying, “If you love Ralph Lauren’s designs, you’ll love these bath towels,” is against eBay policy and may get your listing — and you — kicked off if the towels aren’t actually Ralph Lauren towels. Become the top seller. Both sites rate independent sellers and list reviews. Be sure to offer fast, responsive, and honest transactions at all times to maintain a high seller rating. Just one bad review can send shoppers to the next item listed, and because it takes only seconds to move on in a digital store environment, they most assuredly will. Also consider advertising on both eBay and Amazon. Because both sites attract millions of shoppers per day, if you place relevant ads with strong incentives and offers, you’ll likely get a positive return. With Amazon, a product search produces both catalog items and sponsored links advertising off‐site web stores (which can be enabled to sell to Amazon customers), so you can troll for those millions of Amazon customers in multiple ways by listing in the Amazon catalog plus advertising products and special offers from your own web store.

Article / Updated 04-25-2023

Learning from other marketers’ mistakes is always better than making your own. This information presents ten all‐too‐common marketing mistakes businesses of all sizes make and how to avoid them so you can keep your sales and marketing efforts on track. Making assumptions Assuming that you know your customers, their preferences, their loyalty to you, and the competitive environment in which you operate is one of the most costly mistakes you can make. In most cases, you’re likely wrong. With all the research and feedback tools available today to help you monitor the voice of your customers and their real needs and attitudes, there’s no reason to ever assume anything. Regularly survey your customers to see what they like and don’t like about your brand, your products, and your service. Do surveys to update your Net Promoter Score (NPS) as well. During transactions, ask for individual feedback and engage in social listening. Analyze results to identify trends and things you can do to maintain and increase satisfaction. Ignoring customer complaints With all the social media channels available, unhappy customers can share a bad brand experience with literally thousands of people in a matter of minutes. In addition to their Facebook, Twitter, and other social accounts, they can quickly post negative reviews about you and/or your products on Yelp, Google, Amazon, and other sites that masses of consumers browse daily. Whenever this happens, and it will, respond immediately on the site the customer used for the complaint, and let the unhappy customer and others know that you care about each customer and ask what you can do to make it right. Faking popularity Just like all the “fake news” on social media channels, there’s often also a lot of “fake likes.” Just look at your Twitter messages; chances are you have an offer from someone trying to sell you “followers.” Like fake news, this isn’t acceptable by any business standards because you’re portraying your brand as more popular and successful than you are and misleading consumers about your market position. Using dirty data Nothing’s quite like getting a great offer from a brand you’ve been loyal to for years only to find out that the great offer applies only to new customers! When this happens, it’s often the result of a brand not cleaning up its data to sort out prospects and customers. With all the customer relationship management (CRM) and data management systems available today at many price points, there’s no excuse for this anymore. Customers expect personalized communications about their relationships with you and rewards for their loyalty, and when, after years of giving you their business, non‐customers get a better offer than you’ve given them, you can damage that relationship beyond repair. Competing on price Discounts and price cuts have their place but only temporarily, such as when you’re trying to stimulate first‐time trial and build a base of customers for future email or social media campaigns. Keeping prices low for an extended period of time or offering low prices frequently just puts customers on notice to hold off and never pay full price. You quickly position your brand as the budget option, which limits your appeal, and once you lower a price, you’ll have a hard time ever raising it again. Although reducing prices to meet sales goals may be tempting, keep in mind that repeated price promotions can erode brand value and create fickle customers who abandon you for the competitors’ promotions. Ignoring the emotional drivers of choice 90 percent of people’s thoughts and behavior are driven by their unconscious minds. People respond more to dopamine rushes that make them feel euphoric and unbeatable and oxytocin that makes them feel connected, accepted, and loved than they respond to clever ads or blow‐out pricing specials. When you tap the emotional drivers that influence how people feel about themselves and the world around them, you influence behavior. All you do should be based on creating positive feelings and on building trust. Without trust, you can’t tap into much of anything else. Forgetting to edit If your letter, email, website, print ad, sign, or billboard has a typo in it, people remember that goof and forget the rest. Not only can sloppy mistakes make a bad first impression among prospects, but they can also make people question the amount of attention you pay to detail when producing your products, managing your invoices, and executing on customer service. Edit carefully and get someone else to look over your shoulder to make sure nothing slips by. Your brand is only as good as your reputation. Offering what you can’t deliver When you make promises you’re not sure you can deliver on, you put yourself in the category of bad salespeople who can’t be trusted. In addition, if you try to roll out a product that doesn’t work yet or before you’ve worked out all the details for execution, service, and troubleshooting, you set customers up to have a bad experience with you. Either way, you lose trust and potential sales. In most, if not all cases, those disappointed customers can find another supplier from whom to purchase and to whom to assign their loyalty. Treating customers impersonally Every customer is a person who likes to be treated as such. No one likes to be a number. Today, with all the CRM technology, you can usually identify who is on the other end of a phone call. When you can, you should address that person by name, thank her for her business, and ask if you can do anything else to make her happy. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and take a hard look at all your customer interactions. Are they as personal as they should be? If not, invest in better list‐checking, a central database of customers, training in how to pronounce customer names, and whatever else it takes to allow your business to treat all customers like important individuals. Blaming the customer It’s easy to think that an irate customer is out of line and overreacting. But regardless, you need to take the high road and let the customer be right — within reason, of course. As Neiman Marcus is famous for stating, “The customer is always right” when it to comes to how she feels she should have been treated or the ­quality of product she thought she was buying. This doesn’t mean you have to let people take advantage of you. But when someone has to vent, listen. Try to offer a solution that you both can live with. Whether you work it out or not, you need to remain professional, reasonable, calm, and courteous. If you don’t and even if you were justified, the customer can easily smear your reputation online, and that’s a risk you can’t take.

Article / Updated 04-18-2023

Who does what, when, and where? Such organizational questions plague many sales or marketing managers, and those questions can make a big difference to sales force productivity. Should your salespeople work out of local, regional, or national offices? Should you base them in offices where staff members provide daily support and their boss can supervise their activities closely? Or should you set them free to operate on the road or out of their homes? Or, if you have a small business, should you do all the selling, or does bringing in a salesperson on commission make sense? Determining how many salespeople you need If you have an existing sales force, you can examine the performance of each territory to decide whether more salespeople can help or whether you can do with less and where basic sales service may be falling through the cracks. Ask yourself the following questions to help you optimize your sales organization: Are some territories rich in prospects that salespeople just don’t have time to get to? Then consider splitting those territories or adding salespeople. Are you experiencing high customer turnover in a territory as a result of poor service or other factors that can be controlled? Are you operating in some territories with little sales potential that could be detracting your efforts from those with higher potential? Hiring your own or using reps You have to decide whether to hire salespeople yourself or subcontract. Most industries have good sales companies that take on the job of hiring and managing salespeople for you. Called sales representatives (or just reps), they usually work for a straight commission of between 10 and 20 percent, depending on the industry and how much room you have in your pricing structure for their commission. Reps that perform consultative selling and customized service often expect, and deserve, a higher commission. If you have a small company or a short product line, using sales reps makes the most sense. They’re the best option whenever you have scale problems that make justifying the cost of hiring your own dedicated salespeople somewhat difficult. Scale problems arise when you have a too‐short product line, which means that salespeople don’t have very much to sell to customers, and/or sales calls produce small orders that don’t cover the cost of the call. Reps usually handle many companies’ product lines so that they have more products to show prospects when they call making the potential of a return much higher. If you have a long enough product line to justify hiring and managing your own dedicated salespeople, doing so will give you more control and better feedback from the market. A dedicated sales force generally outsells a sales rep by two and ten times as much because their sales focus is your product line. Finding good sales reps How do you find sales reps? Word‐of‐mouth referrals or meeting at a trade show or industry conference are great ways to find out who is reputable, presents well, and is available. Or, even simpler, ask the buyers of products such as the one you sell for names of reps who currently call on them. A growing number of hub websites offer access to sales reps and manufacturers reps as well as freelance salespeople who work under short‐term contracts. These sites provide leads, not final answers, so make sure you do your screening carefully, and if you do hire someone, do it on a trial basis to start. Here are some of the options on the web today: Goodcall, which claims to have “everything you need to run an outsourced sales team” Time to Hire, which helps you locate sales reps Guru, which cues up sales reps’ ads or posts your project description for them to respond to RepHunter, which specializes in manufacturers reps and independent reps SalesAgentHUB, where you can register as a company in need of reps GreatRep, where you can search the rep database, view postings of Lines Wanted, or post under Reps Wanted Managing reps effectively After you have reps lined up for each territory, you must monitor their sales efforts on a regular basis. Which rep firms sell the best (and worst)? Usually, 10 or 15 percent of the reps make almost all your sales. Monitor your reps to find the best and make changes quickly to cut your losses and maximize your sales potential. And train each rep in how to tell your brand story so your message and ESP are consistent across all reps and marketing channels. Compensating your sales force If you want to recruit top‐tier salespeople, you need to offer them a top‐tier compensation plan. Find a way to make your compensation model different from the norm in your industry to make your job openings really stand out. For example, if you want to make sure your salespeople take a highly consultative, service‐­oriented approach with long‐term support and relationship building, make your compensation salary‐based. If you give them sales incentives, consider bonuses linked to long‐term customer retention or to increased value among existing customers. Your compensation plan will then stand out from competitors and send a clear signal about the kind of sales behavior you expect. Similarly, if you want the most self‐motivated salespeople, offer more commission than the competition. The details of what you must offer in base salary and in commissions vary so much from industry to industry and region to region that you need to research comparable positions to establish a base before you design your compensation plan. Whatever you pay them, salespeople and reps do best when they have high task clarity, defined as clear links from their sales efforts to positive results. Make sure they have the products, leads, knowledge, and support to be successful. You’ll find that success is the greatest motivator, and your sales force enjoys the process of selling for you.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 10-25-2022

You can read a dozen books on marketing strategies for current times, or you can read Marketing For Dummies, 6th Edition for everything you need to know about engaging today’s complex consumers, succeeding at e-commerce, winning the SEO game, driving sales through email, social media, and direct mail campaigns, using diverse channels effectively, and much more. This Cheat Sheet outlines marketing strategies and tactics, and ways to boost results with creativity.

Article / Updated 10-04-2017

Consultative selling is just what is says it is: consulting versus selling. Consumers, clients — everyone — prefer to be informed and involved rather than sold anything. Consultative selling involves providing information and insights that help your customers achieve their goals for budget, performance, and so much more. Beyond providing information that helps with the decision process in an objective manner, consultative selling includes the following actions: Consult first, build trust second, and sell third. Start a relationship by listening to your customers’ needs, identifying their personal values associated with your category, and building rapport as someone who’s like them and understands them. Offer suggestions and solutions that meet their goals, not your sales quota. Address their fears. Find ways to identify their greatest fears so you can present your promise, messages, and offers as a solution to overcome these challenges. Ask thought‐provoking questions that inspire your prospects to think about their problems and solutions from new angles. When you follow these steps, you take price out of the equation and build value that your competitors can’t match. Here are additional tips for consultative selling. Gather information about your customers and prospects to identify the following: Specific issues and needs per the level they’re at in their jobs and the influences of the current market environment What competitors are likely calling on them so you can address their messaging and promises and build your case Anticipate the questions your customers and prospects are likely to ask of you, and be prepared to answer with confidence, validation, and facts. Ask what criterion drives your customers’ decision for products and partners they choose. Don’t assume that you already know this answer. Consultative selling also goes far beyond the first closing. It’s about nurturing the account for an entire lifetime and adding new levels of value along the way. Always do the following to keep accounts and lower attrition and defection rates: Follow through after the sale to ensure that all expectations were met. Do periodic reviews to help identify issues that can be improved and new opportunities. Continue to share insights to help them with all aspects of the job. If you lose a sale to a competitor, call that lead after a few months to see how happy he is with his choice. If he isn’t happy, you just opened the door for a second chance with fewer competitors to beat this time around.

Article / Updated 10-04-2017

Merchandising strategy, the selection and assortment of products offered, creates the foundation of competitive advantage or disadvantage for retailers. The more creative the product offerings and marketing strategies, the greater advantage you have over other retailers. Following are some general strategies and ideas that may get you thinking in new ways about your business. General merchandise retailing The general merchandise retailing strategy allows you to appeal to more people due to having a wide and deep assortment of products, but it also puts you in a very competitive category, which requires a lot of resources to survive. Competitors include department stores, like Macy’s and Lord & Taylor, and big‐box retailers, like Target and Walmart. These businesses have been in place for years and have shrewd negotiators who can get costs down below reason in many cases, making it hard for you to match their prices. Now with the huge sizes of Super Targets and Walmart Supercenters, it can be even harder to match the selection they offer in any category. Limited‐line retailing The limited‐line retailing strategy is another term for specialty or boutique store. A specialty bakery offers more depth and variety of baked items than a grocery store because that’s all it does. Starbucks is a great example of a limited‐line strategy. It sells coffee — coffee‐based specialty products, coffee cups, coffee mugs, cookies that go with coffee, and so on. If you’re competing with an established brand like Starbucks, find a new or local twist that makes your experience a bit different. One example of a coffee shop that really competed with Starbucks and won is one that catered to the healthy sports activist. It sponsors a bike team, sells bike paraphernalia, and offers a sports‐bar type atmosphere, which draws local sports enthusiasts after a great workout or bike ride. Its prices are similar to Starbucks, but it caters to the locals’ lifestyle and offers healthy alternative snacks instead of just rich pastries, something Starbucks has not done well. It’s been successful for many years and even added a new location. Scrambled merchandising Consumers have preconceived notions about what product lines and categories belong together, but retailers have been redefining those notions and succeeding. People used to go to one store for one thing and another store for another thing. But now, you can pretty much find a bit of everything almost anywhere — fast‐food restaurants in big‐box stores, coffee shops adjacent to gas stations, and bookstores and ski shops with coffee shops interweaved. This combination of non‐related product lines is called scrambled merchandising and works well in many locations because it adds interest to the shopping experience and offers consumers convenience at the same time. Think on what you can do to combine two product lines of interest to your consumer base in a way that makes sense, is interesting, and is something people want to buy at the same time. Stimulating sales at point of purchase The point of purchase (POP), where customer meets product, represents a critical opportunity to increase your sales. Although customers may have a planned purchase in mind when heading to your store, research shows that the majority of their purchases are actually unplanned ones. It’s like going to the grocery store for just one thing you need and ending up with $100 worth of groceries you didn’t have in mind at the time. This is the phenomenon of POP advertising, those signs on the shelves or end‐cap aisles that “remind” consumers they need these items, too. This table shows you just how important POP is given the percentage of unplanned purchases at grocery stores and mass merchandise stores. (The statistics are from Point of Purchase Advertising International.) Nature of Consumers’ Purchase Decisions Supermarkets Percent of Purchases Mass Merchandise Stores Percent of Purchases Unplanned 60% 53% Substitute 4% 3% Generally planned 6% 18% Specifically planned 30% 26% Your direct, mass, and display advertising and social media drives people to your store. Your merchandise selection, POP advertising and messaging, pricing and display strategies, atmosphere, and interactive experiences get them to purchase more. And when it all comes together in ways that are inspirational and aspirational, they come back for more and bring others with them. This should be your ultimate goal. Here are some tools you can use to improve engagement and enthusiasm for shopping at your store: Place signage on shelves to draw attention to products that you want to boost sales. Set up free‐standing floor displays that grab attention for products and promotional prices. Add QR codes to displays, signage, and other POP communications if you want to give customers ways to link directly to a promo or an informational web landing page. Display signage with a scannable app code (supplied by a 3D app maker) that in turn produces an augmented reality display on the shopper’s phone or tablet. Let your shoppers see in augmented reality how that hat, bracelet, or other product will look on them. When you make the experience “real” through engaging technologies, consumers internalize the value of your products and become emotionally charged, and that is when you up your chances to close the sale. See the nearby sidebar on augmented reality for more. Exciting displays increase atmosphere and the entertainment value of the shopping experience. If you’re a retailer, create displays to promote your specials. If you’re the manufacturer, create displays to help retailers sell more of your product. A good display should Attract attention. Make your displays novel, entertaining, or puzzling to draw people to them. Build involvement. Give people something to think about or do to involve them in the display. Again, end‐cap demonstration stations or product demo videos work well. Sell the product. Make sure the display communicates the positioning of your brand and the emotional and functional values of your product. Make it as inspirational and aspirational as possible. Before spending a lot of money on displays to ship out to retailers to help sell your products at their places of business, survey them first to assess the likelihood of use. Between 50 and 60 percent of marketers’ POPs never reach the sales floor. If you’re a product marketer who’s trying to get a POP display into retail stores, you face an uphill battle. The stats say that your display or sign needs to be twice as good as the average, or the retailer simply tosses it into the nearest dumpster. For purely e‐commerce sales that don’t involve POP advertising, you can create similar attention for your product and spark unplanned purchases during the online shopping process. Consider using more aspirational photographs, streaming video demonstration of the product, testimonials, and special offers with time limits to create a powerful sense of urgency. Video blogs showing your product’s function and features can help drive traffic to your online store as well. Technology changes and changes quickly for all businesses. You must stay on top of marketing technology changes that impact how you distribute, sell, and market your products and the type of experiences you can create. If you don’t, others will, and you may not survive. Best advice for anyone in marketing today? Don’t blink!

Article / Updated 10-04-2017

Although it’s always wise to check with your attorney before making any final decision concerning special offers and how you market them, you should be familiar with the following list of the more common and serious illegal pricing practices, as indicated by the federal laws of the United States. Make sure you never get fooled into engaging in any of the following: Price fixing: Simply put, price fixing is where businesses that compete with each other discuss and agree on prices to take fair options away from consumers. No form of this is legal or ethical on any level. Price fixing by purchasers: If retailers you sell to are joining together to dictate the wholesale prices they want you to give them, that may also be price fixing. Have a lawyer review any such plans. Exchanging price information: You can’t talk to your competitors about prices. Ever. If you or anyone in your company gives out information about pricing and receives some in return, you could be in trouble. Announcing a planned price increase is called price signaling and is often seen as an unfair exchange of price information to signal to others that everyone should make a price increase. Bid rigging: If you’re bidding for a contract, the preceding point applies. Don’t share any information with anyone. Don’t compare notes with another bidder. Don’t agree to make an identical bid. Don’t split by agreeing not to bid on one job if the competitor doesn’t bid on another. Messing with the bidding process in any manner is bid rigging and can get you in trouble. Parallel pricing: In some cases, the U.S. government can charge you with price fixing, even if you didn’t talk to competitors, just because you have similar price structures. After all, the result may be the same — to boost prices unfairly. In other cases, the law considers similar prices as natural. To be safe, avoid mirroring competitors’ prices exactly. Price squeezes, predatory pricing, limit pricing, and dumping: To the average marketer, these four illegal acts are effectively the same (although they’re tested under different U.S. regulations). They all involve using prices to push a competitor out of business or to push or keep a competitor out of a particular market. Pricing is only part of the equation. How you position your product’s ability to help consumers reach their tangible and intangible goals helps establish your perceived value and the highest price they will pay for that value. Offering discounts and special pricing should be seen as a reward for customer loyalty or first‐time trial, not pricing as usual.

Article / Updated 10-04-2017

Upgrading an existing product might fit nicely into your marketing strategy. Some products are so perfect that they fit naturally with their customers, and you should just leave them alone — for example, the original formula for Coca‐Cola or another food that has a taste and effect that transcends generations. Instead of changing your winning formula, if you’re not losing sales or discovering flaws with what you’re selling, find ways to expand it. After learning from its failed new formula launch, Coca‐Cola updated its original formula by adding Vanilla Coke, Black Cherry Coke, Lime Coke, and Orange Coke and of course the greatest success, Diet Coke. All but Diet Coke fizzled out and now lay in the Coca‐Cola product failure graveyard, but they did generate revenue for a time. How expensive is your upgrade or expansion, and how long will it take to pay off? If a change represents a strong potential profit for even a short period of time, it may be worthwhile. Just weigh the costs and payoff ratio, and make sure your new product is relevant to consumers’ needs and attitudes to avoid creating a graveyard of your own. When an update is no longer cool or selling, cut your losses and move on. Don’t make the mistake of hanging on to a product for nostalgia or hopes it will come back. You stand to lose more than you gain if you do. You’re competing on a changing playing field. Your competitors are trying hard to make their products better, and you have to do the same. Always seek insights into how to improve your product. Always look for early indicators of improvements your competitors plan to make, and be prepared to go one step further in your response. And always go to your marketing oracle — the customer — for insights into how you can improve your product. Following are two tests that a product must pass to remain viable. If your product doesn’t pass, you need to improve or alter it somehow. Passing the differentiation test Your product must pass a differentiation test by being better than its competition on certain criteria due to inherent design features or added service components. Or it needs to be equally as good but offer a great overall value that you can sustain over time. Don’t change prices as your point of differentiation, higher or lower, unless you’ll be able to keep it up indefinitely. Restaurants that raise prices without changing the menu or adding something new to really add a difference worth paying for don’t usually fare well. On the flip side, if you lower your prices to gain more sales, you need to be able to keep it up or suffer bigger losses if you have to raise them back. Passing the champion test Champions are those customers who really love your product, who insist on buying it over others, and who tell their friends or associates to do the same. Champions are great to have, but they’re also rather rare. The championship test is tougher to pass than the differentiation test. Many products lack champions. But when a product does secure them, that product is more likely to live a long and profitable life. Generating champions who are so passionate about your product that they evangelize about it without being asked and pass their passion on to the next generations in their families should be your constant goal as you manage the life cycle of your product. Products with champions get great word of mouth, and their sales and market shares grow with little cost and efforts on the brand’s part as a result. Even better, champions faithfully repurchase the products they rave about. And this repeat business provides your company with high‐profit sales, compared with the higher costs associated with finding new customers. Always stay in touch with your champions, invite them to provide feedback, reward them, and listen to them. If they like something, chances are others will, too. Branding across channels Make sure your have consistent branding across all channels you use. Whether you’re marketing through your blog, a YouTube video or channel, outdoor advertising, brochures, events, or other means, you need to present the same values and persona for your brand. Evaluate your brand identity to make sure it’s presented consistently and that it appears everywhere possible. Stick with your color palette, fonts, and so on to avoid confusion and weaken the instant brand recognition you’re trying to build. Your brand name and logo don’t have to be the most beautiful, sophisticated, or clever to be successful. In fact, many top brands are strikingly simple. What sets them apart from other brands is that they’re recognizable and known, which in turn gives them value and helps them sell products. Rolling your brand out consistently and strongly is even more important than perfecting your logo design. Choose something that’s clear and simple, reflects your values and persona, and then stick to it no matter what.

Article / Updated 10-04-2017

Humans seek and form hives in all areas of our lives. Our social hives are usually made up of people who dress like we do, like the same entertainment, humor, and activities, and have the same religious and political viewpoints and affiliations. Professionally, our hives are made up of people who do the same line of work, have similar achievements, and so on. Given that each of your customers belongs to many hives, you then have potential access to individuals in those hives that are just like them. Gaining access to customers’ hives is critical for marketing success and to acquiring customers with some of the lowest costs of acquisition. Most people belong to several formal and casual organizations compromised of people just like them. These groups provide support systems, structure, and opportunities to collaborate with others on common causes, or to just have fun. Most importantly, they provide emotional bonds and loyalty to causes and others that are hard to break. Brands can do this, too. And they must because the most powerful form of marketing is consumer to consumer, or C2C, which applies to both live and digital worlds. Despite all the time people spend socializing on “social media,” they still thrive being around people, meeting with them face to face rather than just screen to screen. Events that bring customers together are powerful for not just delivering messages, performing product demos, or introducing new products; they’re most powerful for building validation and passion for a brand and its products and escalating loyalty because to leave a brand means to leave your support systems, friends, and social network and risk being embarrassed among those you recruited to the group. Imagine the kind of movements you can spark for your category and brand by tapping your customers’ social and real‐world networks. Find out which groups and causes your customers tend to align with. Ask them in surveys or at the point of sale. Find out what matters most to them and find affiliated organizations that also make sense for your brand to support. These organizations often provide opportunities for live interaction, content marketing, sponsorship, and advertising options. Following are some ideas for events and experiences that can help you build your relationships with customers and qualified prospects, strengthen your place in their lives, and inspire them to introduce you to their networks of like people and, of course, like customers. “Face” your customers: Events that inspire engagement, loyalty, and referrals Although you can use many tools to automatically communicate with large networks online, you can never underestimate the power of engaging face to face. Even in a digital world, there is still a need for human touch. People still like to shop at retail stores, see others giving them product advice, and touch the products. This is human nature, which will never change. The possibilities for face‐to‐face marketing are many, but no matter what you do, all interactions in the real world, and the digital world for that matter, should provide a meaningful experience that is relevant to your consumers and the role you play in simplifying or enhancing their lives. The goal of your live interaction with customers and prospects should be to make every customer feel like your most valued, no matter how small or big his revenue stream is for you. Here are some ideas for live marketing events designed to strengthen your bonds with customers and inspire them to introduce you to their hive: Customer events: Events are important to building relationships with customers that create loyalty beyond just customer satisfaction. The key to success is to keep them meaningful and interactive and not just lecture about your brand or products. Think of events for your customers in general and for your segments for highly relevant engagement. Trade shows: Trade shows are great for building visibility and presence among customer and partner prospects within your industry. You can get a lot of value from exhibiting and getting in front of prospects or just attending for some informal networking. A client‐appreciation event: A party for entertaining and recognizing your customers can be a great way to strengthen relationships. A fundraising dinner for an important charity: Supporting worthwhile causes is critical to gaining trust, support, and loyalty among your customers. In May 2015, Cone Communications conducted studies that showed that more than 70 percent will donate to and volunteer for a group supported by a trusted brand. A community event for families: Not everything has to be business‐oriented. If you have the resources, consider organizing a fun, social event that enables you to mingle with your customers and build friendships. A client advisory board: Invite a select group of good customers to join your advisory board. Organizing and funding meetings in interesting venues can make it worth their while to provide new ideas and open their networks to you. Local supply chains where you wholesale to your neighbors and local stores that sell to their own communities: If this sounds like an old‐fashioned trunk show, that’s the point! It’s face to face and person to person without any sales pressure. A workshop in which you share your expertise or solve problems for participants: Live workshops are engaging, social, and a great platform for building trust with customers and prospects. Live events are a great way to build better bonds with your network and your customers and prospects, and they’re a great way to meet people in their collective networks. Send invites to customers and encourage them to bring their friends. Make them feel recognized and special when they come. Find a way to mingle customers with prospects so that your customers become ambassadors at your events, spreading your message directly. Always make sure you collect names and contact information for attendees so you can add them to your database and follow up accordingly. Whatever the business‐oriented opportunity, keep in mind that you’re still trying to attract and hold the attention of people, not businesses. You’re interested in the people in any business who make the purchase decisions. Make sure your ­business‐oriented events are relevant to people, not just an industry. Mix up your marketing to create interest and ROI If you’re planning your own event, keep in mind that it needs to be entertaining as well as professional and informative to draw attendance. To get someone to sit through two days of lectures on the impact of new technologies in the industry, or product demos of any nature, your chances are higher if you make it fun and social at the same time. Add cocktail receptions, outings such as golf, sunset hikes, dinner concerts, and other activities relevant to your invitee list. Attendance is often high at conferences and other corporate events at places like Las Vegas that attract tourists and offer a lot of interesting after‐hours things to do. But be careful, especially when planning events targeting B2B purchasers. With corporate travel budgets declining, if you have too much fun planned and not enough functional take‐away sessions, your event could seem like a junket, and your customers could fail to get approval to attend. Some events become staples that gain visibility and impact with each repetition. Customer events, such as those hosted by Salesforce, Adobe, and Microsoft, attract thousands each year and are challenging attendance at long‐running events hosted by trade associations. If your event seems to be a success, find ways to do it again, and make it big enough to attract sponsors who add credibility, value, and of course funding.

Article / Updated 10-03-2017

Being innovative can give you a strong competitive advantage in your market. A competitor’s major new product introduction probably changes the face of your market — and upsets your sales projections and profit margins — at least once every few years. So you can’t afford to ignore new product development. You should introduce new products as often as you can afford to. For most, coming up with a new idea is the first hurdle. One you have jumped that hurdle, survey your customers, ask your salespeople what they come up against the most, and so on. There’s no single formula for inventing new products. Give customers a chance to be involved in product development. Daybreak Game Company, LLC, formerly Sony Online Entertainment, invites users to help develop its new online game adventures and has achieved amazing loyalty and brand equity as a result. You just need to engage in a new and different thinking process. Do something new to produce something new. Partnering with experts to build and market new products One of the most effective and powerful ways to develop and launch new products is to partner with experts in a given field. They provide the insights and technology for a product for which you are the exclusive commercial business partner and co‐owner of the product patent. Most such relationships involve licensing and royalty agreements that benefit and protect both parties. More often than not, these experts can be found in the academic and research science fields as PhD research scientists and/or professors. If you’re in the sports industry and want to make a product to help improve the game and personal joy for weekend warriors who tend to be hitting middle age and the issues that go with it, it may make sense to work with sports scientists to develop a product that’s functional for sports activities and valuable for injury prevention, too. That is what Kim Gustafson did when he launched Opedix, LLC, which produces compression tights to help ligaments avoid taking the wear and tear of prolonged motion. His goal was to create a product that would enable professional and recreational athletes to stay active longer, enhance their performance, and prevent injuries, too. Gustafson determined that no existing companies making similar products for injury prevention and performance support had scientific evidence to back up their product claims, so he teamed up with the world’s leading sports medicine laboratories, The Steadman Philippon Research Institute and the Human Dynamics Laboratory. The team hypothesized that if a non‐stretch banding material were strategically integrated into the design of traditional compression tights, the banding should provide anatomical benefits. Using state‐of‐the‐art motion analysis systems/equipment, the hypothesis proved to be correct. This new product provided “directional compression,” and they applied for a patent for the Opedix Knee‐Tec Tights, which offer valid results for runners, skiers, and other athletes. They identified both the sports and medical markets as opportunities. The sports market offered the path of least resistance (easier market entry). Doing this alone would have been difficult and costly. Partnering with experts not only helped Gustafson develop a strong product, but it also added scientifically valid credibility for performance claims that would have been hard for him to get on his own. Teaming up with experts in a field of science or technology to let them develop products for you offers many advantages, and you can do so in many different ways, including the following: Pay developers upfront to create apps or technological products for you and assign ownership of the patent to you. Split the costs of research and development and assign royalties on sales accordingly. Secure an arrangement where you provide marketing and distribution and your partner all the R&D and production and then share the profits according to what makes sense given each party’s expenditure upfront. Whatever you do, make sure you think of the short‐term and the long‐term impact of your contract. Partnering with experts can enable you to develop products your competitors don’t have and can’t get without developing them on their own, which is cost‐prohibitive. As a result, you can emerge as the leading innovator in your industry and the one to watch for consumers, investors, and more. You have to be only one step ahead of your competition to win the game, not several, but you must stay ahead. Continuing to add products that are exclusive to your brand is a pretty sure way to do just that. Getting marketing insights from customers One of the best sources for new product ideas that fit your brand’s competencies and customers’ perceptions of you is to ask them. When you do a customer satisfaction survey, add a simple question that gives you powerful insights. Try asking the following: Is there anything missing from our current product line that you would like to see us add? Are there any services we can provide that would help you get greater efficiencies or functionality out of the products you currently purchase from us? Of the following products or services, what are you most likely to trust us to deliver to you with the same quality we currently provide? (List new product or service ideas.) Using the significant difference strategy Remember, nearly all new products fail. Even big brands that once dominated their markets fail. Just do an Internet search for brands that have failed in 10 or 20 years and check out the long lists that pop up. Read how these brands fail and take notes not to follow their path. To achieve real success, you have to introduce something that really looks new and different to the market. The product needs a clear point of difference. Innovations that consumers recognize quickly and easily provide the marketer with a greater return. Researchers who study new product success use the term intensity to describe this phenomenon. The more intense the difference between your new product and old products, the more likely the new product can succeed. The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) publishes reviews of good new books on product development. PDMA also offers conferences, training, and other services to its members.