News

How to frame prices for more revenue and profit

November 19^th, 2021 in News

The most illogical pricing experiment in history shows us that how you frame your prices – how you present them – is just as important as where you set them. The experiment was performed by Professor Dan Ariely in the early 2000’s. He saw this advert for a subscription to The Economist: This looks to be utterly nonsensical. The Economist is offering the print and web subscription for the same price as the print-only subscription. Surely, nobody in their right mind would take the…

How to measure brand awareness for your business

November 18^th, 2021 in News

Understanding how to measure brand awareness is a critical part of building a successful sales process. The logic is inescapable: you have to be known before somebody can choose to buy from you. From that starting point, it’s a short step to recognise that if more people are aware of you, more people can buy from you. But how do you find out your level of brand awareness? How do you know if you’ve got an awareness problem? There’s a simple way to find out. The answer is to do a bit of…

Perceptual maps show how you compare to your competitors

November 12^th, 2021 in News

Perceptual maps are a quick and easy way to get a deep understanding of how you compare to your competitors. Most competitor comparisons are pretty dry and statistical: revenue, profit or market share. While this is a great way to see how you stack up it only tells you what the situation is, not why. Perceptual maps provide the why. The idea behind a perceptual map is that it tells you how your customers and other people in the market perceive you. The clue’s in the name. It’s about…

Blocking email tracking is a good thing, not a disaster

November 11^th, 2021 in News

Apple announced a while back that it was going to start blocking email tracking. It’ll do this by preventing its email application from reporting whether people open marketing emails. I heard one podcast I follow and like – the Target Internet podcast – call this “Apple Mailgeddon”. That’s a trifle over-dramatic, but why not? Announcements like this are not uncommon. This time it’s Apple. Next time it might be Google. Or Microsoft. Or Yahoo (does Yahoo still exist)? All of…

6 reasons to market harder when business is booming

November 10^th, 2021 in News

Research has proved an uncomfortable truth: when business is booming, when all your sales and marketing efforts are starting to pay off, the last thing you want to do is take your foot off the gas. It would be nice to think that when you’ve reached a position of dominance in your industry – or at least prominence – you can start to reap the rewards. You can take money out of the business. Stop marketing, crash the plane. Research from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute shows that this is…

What’s the big deal about marketing automation?

September 15^th, 2021 in News

This is why marketing automation’s such a big deal. Think about your website. It’s the single most powerful weapon in most business’ sales and marketing armoury. Let’s use our website as an example. Imagine Joe Bloggs visits this page about brand marketing. That leads them to this page about brand advertising. And then to this page about brand attributes. That’s all very standard so far. Marketing automation responds to website activity. But, on…

Scary but true: nobody knows anything (in marketing)

September 1^st, 2021 in News

We didn’t come up with that title “Nobody knows anything”. It came from William Goldman. Goldman, dead now, was a Hollywood screenwriter. As well as working on films like Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, he also wrote a hugely entertaining commentary on the movie business called “Adventures In The Screen Trade”. He followed it up with “Which Lie Did I Tell?” which should give you some idea of his irreverent attitude. Outside the movie business, one of his most famous…

Learning from Apple marketing

June 23^rd, 2021 in News

Learning from the masters of a trade is a good way to improve our own skills. When it comes to brand marketing, we often think of Apple as the best proponent of the art. But it’s also useful to learn about how the masters did it wrong before they learned to do it right. Apple can teach us that just as well as anyone else. If you think Apple got it right from Day One, think again. The story starts with IBM The lessons we can learn from Apple’s marketing don’t start with an Apple…

4 steps for business growth

April 20^th, 2021 in News

We’re writing this as the UK emerges from the COVID/Brexit recession although, in all honesty, when haven’t we been emerging from a recession? If there’s such a thing as an evergreen topic, “business growth” is it. To put this recovery into focus, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has just released research that shows: 63% of UK businesses are starting to show signs of recovery. Only 16% of businesses now report the pandemic’s impact as being “extremely negative”; that…

NPS scores may not be honest

March 11^th, 2021 in News

There are times when you won’t get honest NPS scores (Net Promoter Score) in response to the standard question. That question is usually: “On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a colleague?” There are at least two situations when you can deliver fantastic value and service and still get a poor score. NPS scores and channel partners NPS scores might not be as high as they should be if you’re asking a dealer, reseller or distributor. Dealers don’t want…