Category: Strategy
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#11: What business are we really in?
An old-school management consultant question for you today. Coined by Theodore Levitt way back in 1960. But just as relevant today … ‘What business are we really in?’ Understanding – really understanding – that what you ‘do’ is very often not the thing people are buying, can change the fortunes of a business by making…
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#09: What is our industry’s reputation?
Your industry as a whole has a reputation. Ask 10 people what word comes to mind when thinking about your industry and you’ll quickly see what I mean. You need to do this. Because people are considering your marketing message, with your industry’s reputation in mind. If the language people use or their reaction is…
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#08: Who’s sniffing our cheese?
Back in 1998, Dr. Spenser Johnson wrote ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’. At just 92 pages you can read this book in a couple of hours. And if you haven’t, you probably should. It’s a parable about the inevitability of change. Cheese represents the thing you want. Of course, no source of cheese lasts forever. That’s…
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#07: How can we make selling superfluous?
Peter Drucker famously said: “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits them and sells itself.” For every 100 people that read that quote, probably 99 just carry on ‘marketing as usual’. ‘Marketing as usual’…
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#04: What are we doing to fix our referral leakage?
Every business has ‘referral leakage’. ‘Referral leakage’ is the difference between the number of times customers RECOMMEND your business and the number of REFERRALS you actually receive. There’s always a discrepancy between those 2 numbers! You can fix ‘referral leakage’ in 4 steps … 1) Survey your customers to discover who’s been recommending you. You…