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Aggressive Small Business Marketing & Advertising
Showing archives from 07/2006.
The sign of a strong brand
Posted by Michael Cage on Monday, July 24, 2006Emphasis mine...
Whole Foods has received about 500 e-mails from people in Columbia Heights. Some bear messages as simple as "We beg you!" Others contain sophisticated references to the company's stock price, corporate strategy and the neighborhood's demographics. Many of the writers said they admired the company's social conscience and employment practices. Whole Foods gets similar requests every day, said Kate Lowery, spokeswoman for the 184-store chain, which was founded 27 years ago as a natural foods store in Austin and had $4.7 billion in sales last year. "We even get e-mails from people who say 'I'm thinking of moving to a certain city but before I leave, do you have any plans to move there?' " she said.
That's a strong brand, from the Washington Post.
There are 0 comments, add your own!Blogging to differentiate? … BS!!!
Posted by Michael Cage on Monday, July 17, 2006B.L. Ochman reports on a few of the key conclusions in eMarketer's 15-page, $695 2006 Business of Blogging report. One, in particular, I want to comment on:
Blogs are a great way to avoid seeming interchangeable with competitors.
With apologies to Marshall McLuhan, here's the glaring flaw with this thinking...
Blogs are media.
A method to deliver a message.
Media can deliver a great message filled with personality and vitality ... or it can be used to deliver meaningless, stiff, corporate drivel.
A blog, in and of itself, will do nothing to differentiate yourself from competitors. (Blogging advocates aside, the "oh jeez, another blog" point is here or fast approaching.)
A well-done blog ... with personality, insight, interactivity, mythology and compelling discussion ... can revolutionize a business.
Of course, all of those things can be done, in different ways, using traditional media, too. That's a topic for another day ... for the moment I'll say that if you don't focus on integrating those things in your [store experience, direct mail, phone scripts, packaging, product design, web site, store experience, welcome package and dozens of other things] you are making an enormous mistake.
There are 73 comments, add your own!Why businesses really fear blogging
Posted by Michael Cage on Friday, July 14, 2006Terrific post from Christopher Kenton at Marketonomy (emphasis mine):
Not primarily because of the lack of control—that only scares those who were good at controlling their image in the first place, an elite few who are now engaged in tactics to control their image in the new paradigm. What far more businesses fear is the lack of a consistent, cohesive and compelling story--much less business operation--they can be confident in sharing and defending clearly to win the hearts and minds of their market. After all, it’s easy to package, polish and publish a perfect message for mass consumption. But to embody that message as a business, to understand its meaning and its implications throughout every commercial function, to champion that message and to believe it, that takes something that most businesses just haven’t spent a whole lot of timing working out.
This deserves a comment, but I don't have the time to do it right now ... other than to say a) it is an excellent post, b) you need to go and read the entire post, and c) I have more to say about this last paragraph and how it applies to truly great, fast-growing small businesses and the entrepreneurs who run them. More soon.
There are 1 comments, add your own!Are you in a business you don’t enjoy?
Posted by Michael Cage on Thursday, July 13, 2006Are you in a business that you don't enjoy and feel passionate about? If so, I'd love to know a) why you got into it in the first place and b) whether you plan on staying in it longer.
Feel free to E-mail the to michael DOT cage AT gmail DOT com if you don't want your answer displayed publicly.
This is going somewhere, but I can't tell you where ... not just yet.
There are 4 comments, add your own!Small Consulting Practices: An educated client is a more profitable client
Posted by Michael Cage on Thursday, July 13, 2006A mistake I see happening in many small consulting practices is assuming the client knows as much about what you can do as you do. Consider…
Your clients do not know all of the solutions you provide. I’m endlessly amazed at the number of consultants who believe their clients will ask them about all of the solutions available or even know the right questions to ask. Using an example from the computer reseller and computer consulting world: One a client buys a few computer systems from you, they put you in the “computer system place” category. Unless you take the time to educate about additional products and services, most clients will not go out of their way to ask what they are.
Your clients have problems they do not know you can solve. Clients have many problems you can solve. But with many of those problems, they have no idea that your business can help solve them. It is up to you to identify the problems, let the client know you understand them, and tell them what to do about it. (There is a never-fail system I use to do this, it’ll be the topic of another post. Keep an eye out...)
Your clients are paying you to be the expert. They do not know everything there is to know about your business, and they do not stay on top of every new development in the industry. You must anticipate their wants, needs, problems and goals. Then connect the dots between what they want and what you offer to fix it. Recently, a computer consultant client of mine added 27% to his net monthly profit simply by noticing a common problem his clients had and automatically offering it as an “add-on” for every job no matter what they were buying. A certain percentage say yes, and my client deposits bigger checks with no additional marketing cost.