We b2b market researchers are guilty of asking lots of questions. Too many. We like the tangible and the specific. We want to understand what a respondent buys, how often, in what quantities. What do they think of this supplier and that? What satisfa...
If you are selling diapers (nappies we call them in the UK) you should target parents with babies. If you’re selling razors, target people who shave. This is common sense. Or is it? An article in the Financial Times last week caught our eye bec...
During a briefing by academics at the London School of economics, the Queen of England asked a very nasty question about the credit crunch – “why did nobody notice it?”. One or two people since have put their hands up and said that they had pre...
August is the silly season. It is the time of year, when we disappear on holiday and the world goes quiet for a month. The vacuum is filled with stories that are simply bonkers. One such story caught our eye last week and we squirmed because it is ba...
Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, is always good for a quote. We came across one the other day which got us thinking. It said: “Starbucks is not an advertiser; people think we are a great marketing company, but in fact we spend very lit...
What would you think is a fundamental customer need, a key differentiator, whose importance has diminished over the past 3 years? It is responsiveness. This indicator of customer-orientation has dropped down the list of requirements in many of our st...
If you opened the Financial Times this weekend, on page 3, the slot reserved for beautiful women in the Sun and the Mirror, you would have seen the above advert. For those of us in marketing this sepia image is just as arresting as bare bosoms. Here ...
Three years ago, an interesting experiment was carried out by Guy Mayraz, an economist at the University of Melbourne. He divided students into two groups. He told one group to imagine they are bakers and the other group to imagine they are farmers. ...
Selling has never been regarded as a profession – at least it’s never been thought of as a profession in the same way as architects, doctors or engineers are seen as professions. It is associated with the Avon lady, the Fuller Brush Company o...
We like the concept of the value equivalence line. When somebody buys something, there is a natural balance between the price they pay and the perceived benefits they get. Think about cars. Mercedes may be perceived to be expensive but the people who...
