Business development people often try to improve their sales prospects by approaching the “decision maker.” Usually this means “going straight to the top” and speaking directly to the “man in charge.” Why waste time with underlings and formalities?
In reality, this is rarely successful and usually does more harm than good. Not only is the so called “decision maker” unlikely to be sold, a clumsy approach is very likely to poison the well and decrease the likelihood of an eventual sale.
The marketing world is changing as never before. The backslapping, clubby culture of Madison Ave. is being transformed in a world of bytes, databases and algorithms that is increasingly ruled by geeks rather than suits.
The old order is gone but the new order has yet to arrive. The fate of marketing services companies is still an open question.
What’s the difference between a great brand and a silly slogan?
A powerful brand is incredibly valuable. Interbrand estimates that a successful brand can be worth tens of billions of dollars. That’s far too much money to be attributed to nice words or cool colors. What makes a brand valuable is the promises it makes and keeps.
Here are some examples of great brands that win through making and keeping their promises.
In response to my article about the Apple iPad on Sunday, a reader posted this fantastic list of predictions on LinkedIn. Although, he prefers to remain anonymous, he agreed to let me post it here.
Here’s the list. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Everybody wants value for money. Accountability is a crucial element of any business relationship. Shouldn’t there be a simple formula to evaluate return on marketing investment?
Unfortunately, there isn’t one and there never will be. Running a business requires judgment, skill and experience. Any simple rule of thumb is bound to be either so narrow that it misses the big picture or so general that it’s meaningless.
That doesn’t stop people from trying though, which is why we’re inundated with ROI myths. Here are four of the most damaging:
Fool me once. Shame on you. Fool me twice… I won’t get fooled again!
How about a third time?
Almost as soon as Apple came out with the iPad, it became fashionable for the technorati to point out its flaws. However, Apple will surely prove the naysayers wrong, just as they did with the iPod and the iPhone.
For many, Social Networks begin and end with Social Media, but network analysis is about much more than tweeting. As the tools improve, Social Network Analysis will become as important to marketing as target group analysis was a generation ago.
Understanding networks will help us bring order to the complexity and chaos in the world around us. From how information spreads to managing sales and finding the information we need, networks can help us run our businesses better.
Rules make it easy for us, they absolve us of responsibility. With a little bit of work, we can learn the rules and apply them. If we can show that we’re following them, we can prove that we’re doing our jobs. Unfortunately, we won’t be doing them very well.
For a system of rules to be effective, it would have to be verifiable, internally consistent and complete. Unfortunately, that is a logical impossibility. Effective management isn’t about following rules, it’s about showing good judgment in the face of uncertainty.
Many people who like to think they take a pragmatic view miss out on the reality of the way things actually work. Many of the most useful ideas are also the most bizarre.
It is through the improbable that we achieve the practical.
The New York Times announced that they will indeed switch to a metered model in 2011. This is an incredibly bad idea.
Let’s call this move what it really is: the subsidize paper – charge online model. Most newspapers lose money on print and distribution, why do they expect to charge on the web where marginal costs are zero and low barriers to entry make competition incredibly voracious?
Most of all going to a metered model will distract them from the real task at hand: learning how to run an online business.
Or install manually
Copy and paste the following Google tag code onto every page of your website, immediately after the element. Don’t add more than one Google tag to each page.
