People like to buy products and services from people and companies they like. You want to find out what kind of things customers would like you to do for them. I guarantee that this is more than just providing a product, and it isn’t just service. Customers want you to...
Marketing
Most buying decisions are not spontaneous. Instead, they involve a whole series of steps. For example, a company buying a new copier might appoint one person or a group of people to decide which copier to buy. Those people will quickly look at ten or twenty models, then choose three...
One area to consider is people’s motivation. What do they try to accomplish when they purchase a product. Image-oriented motivation. A desire to be practical, to have the biggest and best product, or to be on the cutting edge of technology is an image-oriented motivation. The image people have of...
If you can correct a major reason that people won’t buy and make that correction obvious, you will have a point where you can be better than competitors. Some of the reasons people won’t buy are: Fear of loss. This affects industrial accounts more than consumers. Buyers don’t like to...
If you are going to be action-oriented, you can get bogged down in theoretical marketing concepts. Instead, you need to look at marketing in a straightforward way that’s easy to understanding. The most profitable way to look at marketing is to consider it as just six steps: Discovering where the...
If you have a new product ready to launch that is not yet absolutely perfect but is still better than what is on the market, introduce it. Don’t postpone the launch until every little thing is fixed. Don’t wait until you have the perfect product. If the new product...
Most people and most companies do not like change. Organizations fear change and the unknown. People are uneasy with uncertainty and ambiguity. People like normalcy and predictability. This corporate and organizational mindset is a challenge for the marketing superstar. The marketing superstar is responsible for spurring prudent change that gets...
Like the professional golfer who has a teaching coach to take a quarter stroke off her game or the All-Pro wide receiver that stretches the football across the goal line, the marketing superstar also competes for inches. Superstars work to build sales volume; to build profitable market share; to build...
You must be able to correctly, objectively, and completely answer these questions. It doesn’t matter how you get the answers. Someone else can do the research. But it does matter where you get the answers. You get the answers from customers and potential customers. *Why do customers buy your product?...
The marketing superstar must know the answer to many critical questions. The answers are essential to proper market segmentation, product positioning, pricing, selling, advertising, and crafting marketing action plans. These questions are especially important for new products. Lazy marketers don’t know the answers, they hunch the answers, or they ignore...