Business

You can talk about what your product or service does. Or you can talk about how the product/service makes the buyer feel. Most companies talk objectively. “This is what we’re selling. It does X, Y and Z. It costs this much. It comes in these sizes/colors/whatever. How many do you want?” Other companies, in contrast, talk about the feeling of owning said product or service – and they back it up in their communication. They’re as much – if not more – focused on the experience the customer may have after buying the product. They spend so much time and effort on customer experience because they know that’s how people buy. Take a look at the image below (you can click on it to make it open larger in a new window, if you like). It’s a screenshot from Apple’s website. It’s the way that Apple want you to see their MacBook Air laptop computer. If you can’t see the image below, you can click here. Now, take a look at the image below – again, you can click on it to enlarge it. As a comparison, this is a screenshot from HP’s website. It’s how you go about configuring …

Customers today are more demanding than ever before. They’re smarter than ever before. Because they have more knowledge – and therefore more POWER, than they have ever had. So why should they buy from you, as opposed to the company down the street, or the next town – or half way across the world?

The turkey leftovers been consigned to the cat, or the bin. The Christmas tree has dropped more needles than you’ll find at a Kurt Cobain tribute concert. Now it’s time to dig your company’s marketing out of the dark ages and into the 21st Century. Your customers expect it. Albert Einstein is quoted as once saying the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Yet that’s exactly what a gazillion small businesses are doing right now with regards to how they approach branding, marketing, sales, lead generation, and communications. If you didn’t make your sales / marketing goals last year, what makes you think that you’re going to make them this year if your plans are to do the same things? A 21st century marketing plan isn’t a “copy-paste” of what you did last year. Dear business leader, please wake up and smell the arabica. You cannot continue to sell your company’s products or services in ways that Don Draper would applaud. Today’s consumer (and whether you’re B2B or B2C, your customer is always a consumer) is smarter, more knowledgeable, more demanding and more attractive than ever before (OK, maybe I …

There are many who’ll say that today’s TV advertising is crass, blatant and bereft of creativity. Then an ad such as this comes along (click here if you can’t see the ad below): I’ve only just been made aware of the piece, which was launched back in October 2011. Instead of doing the usual thing of boring the viewer with hyped rhetoric about how great / affordable / whatever their holiday packages are, Thomson Holidays turn the message around to it being about you, the viewer, with a simple voiceover from a young boy: “It’s time you stopped, put down your phone, and hold your loved one’s hand. Nice, isn’t it? Those close to you: share with them a week or two, and they’ll cherish it forever.” They could have shouted about how great / interesting / value for money / whatever their holidays are, as pretty much every holiday company does in their advertising. They could have packed the spot with bright colors, loud music and flashing images and shoved their message down the viewer’s throat. Instead, we have calm, relaxing visuals, with a soundtrack featuring a orchestral reworking of The Pixies’ 1988 track “Where Is My Mind?” (the piano solo was apparently recorded …

It’s easy for small business owners to assume their audience knows more about what’s on offer than they actually do. Because you’re living and breathing your business every day, it’s easy to overlook that fact that everyone else doesn’t necessarily see all the nuts and bolts of your value offering in the same way. Let me give you an example. In your industry, would it be common practice for suppliers to provide: A complimentary 30 day trial, without customers needing to give a credit card number? Discounts for nurses / teachers / students? Free delivery and training? A 5% discount on invoices if they’re paid within 30 days? Perhaps you offer something that’s part of the deal because “that’s the way everyone does it” in your industry. And because it’s commonplace, you don’t think it’s worth mentioning. Just because you know, doesn’t mean that your customers know. It’s not their job to guess, speculate, or presume. It may be obvious to you that prices don’t include sales tax, or that installation and training is free. But perhaps your customers are unaware of such things. Moreover by not explicitly mentioning it, your customers may think that you don’t offer it. Communicating …

It been an absolute age since I published a guest post here, so I’m going to remedy that straight away. This week’s post is from Jon Gordon, speaker and author of a number of books including The No Complaining Rule. Over to you, Jon… Smiling is important. Eye contact matters. Patience is essential. Being warm and friendly is a must. And providing a positive emotional experience for your customers is a priority. But these are not the greatest of customer service strategies. Ironically the greatest of all strategies has nothing to do with customers and everything to do with employees. The Greatest Strategy is this: Great customer service beings with being employee focused first and customer focused second. If you treat your employees well, they will treat their customers well. Too often businesses, hospitals, restaurants and organizations focus all their energy on the customer while ignoring the very employees that serve their customers. This may work in the short run but eventually employees become tired, burned out, negative and resentful. Just the other day I was speaking at a hospital and was told that they were doing patient satisfaction surveys as a way to improve nurse performance. “What about nurse …

Back in 1995, I landed a job at a London-based systems integrations company that sold their wares into – amongst others – the printing industry. It was a transitory time, from both a technical as well as a commercial perspective. The publishing industry was coming to terms with – for example – no longer being able to charge £70 (about $110) for printing out a “proof” of a magazine page for an advertising agency or publishing company. It was also to be the beginning of the end for the newspaper advertising “Gate Keepers.” These were a group of perhaps five premedia companies that, together, pretty much had the monopoly on preparing and sending ads to the major UK newspaper publishers. Their rationale was that preparing files for newspaper printing needed specialist knowledge – their knowledge. This was back in the day when preparing a PDF file that was fit for the printing press was a lot more complex than it is today. It was before the time of industry standards such as PDF/X-1a, for example. If your company wanted to run an ad in any of the major UK newspapers, the file could only be sent to the publisher via …