Archive for 2012
Top 6 – March 2012
Giving up is living suicide. I choose life. The responsibility for ensuring your customers care about your differential value is yours. The big picture in marketing today is that we have highly sophisticated customers who have vast quantities of information at their fingertips. You don’t fool smart customers by spinning falsehoods. We are all servants…
Read MoreRevenues Gained by Service Fees Undermines Relationship Marketing Goals
Are irritating fees undermining marketers’ hope for establishing relationships with consumers and creating “customers for life.” Read on…
Read MorePricing Strategy Defined in Three Questions
There are three key questions that must be asked for every pricing problem. Each must be asked from the customer’s perspective, not your own. Number 1: What is the alternative? Number 2: Are you better or worse? And Number 3: Why should I expletive care?
Read MoreIt’s My Own Damn Fault
The question some suppliers constantly ask is “How did we get into a situation where the only thing that seems to matter to our customers is price?” It’s an important question, and one where the unfortunate answer often is, in the words of Jimmy Buffett, “It’s my own damn fault”.
Read MoreTop 6 – February 2012
Progress can’t make itself. Make it. If you want to win, you have to be in the game. Who is your target market? What do they need? What is your distinctive competency in delivering to those needs? How will you communicate this to your target market? Being hardworking or smart isn’t good enough. I have…
Read MoreBusiness Selling: Choosing the Right Methodology
How should salespeople sell? Yes, they need to be well groomed (presentable), have a good people skills and a tough skin, and have an orientation towards action and winning. But assuming they have these basic skills, what specifically should they do?
Read MoreCorporate Icons Falling Like House of Cards
What do Eastman Kodak, Sears Roebucks, K-Mart and American Airlines have in common? They are all U.S. corporate icons on the verge of implosion and each one of these likely failures is through a fault of corporate marketing management. The rules for marketing are pretty simple. So what is “marketing?”
Read MoreThe Resurrection of the Golden Goose
A few months ago, the future of Netflx looked quite bleak after a serious of pricing mistakes and the creation and destruction of a separate company for streaming videos without the mail component. Is there hope yet?
Read MoreTwitter — Show Me the Money
Starting with the dot.com bubble of a few years ago, marketers have been intrigued by the new Internet technologies and their profit-making potential. Huge amounts of investment capital have flowed into these ventures and most quickly collapsed victimizing both employees and investors. Now, we find ourselves in the midst of another round of promising schemes based on the “social networking” movement. One of stars of this movement is “Twitter.” The problem is how is this concept going to make money?
Read MoreSales vs. Pricing and Large Account Management
Prices are too high for our customers. Sales is giving away our product. We have heard these claims. Many times. These arguing points between the professionals who manage customers and those who manage prices have been fought over for aeons. Yet which group is right?
To address the issue of pricing and account management, let us leverage the research by Miller and Heiman into the creation of thought leadership in pricing.