Don’t let price decide. Give consumers a reason to buy your brand over others so price is just another factor. Brand building is all about communicating how your widget is different and better than others sold on Amazon, various e-commerce sites and in retail stores. It’s about listening to people who use your product and have tried others, how they describe their experiences and how each product makes them feel. It’s about listening to people…
What is it about these 17 days of sport and politics that captivates us and unifies an otherwise often divided nation? Why did twice as many people watch the Olympics Sunday night compared to the combined primetime viewership of ABC, CBS and FOX? How do you create a brand your customers love? There’s a lot for business people to learn from the Olympics. Lesson #1: Make it about a common goal. The Games matter because…
#1: Spending marketing dollars without knowing your “allowable acquisition cost”. Allowable acquisition cost is how much you can afford to spend to attract a new customer and meet your profit objectives. It starts with calculating the average customer’s lifetime value. #2: Listening to your friends. Many of our clients have come to us after spending a lot of money with the wrong advertising agency. Yes, as Nielsen reports, 92% of people trust recommendations from friends…
Start-ups are teaching larger organizations some lessons, but are they listening? By the time some organizations finally schedule a meeting to decide who should study an upstart’s new product, the small company has already released its next version. Act now. Tweak later. These are the days of “minimum viable product” or MVP. MVP is a strategy used for fast and quantitative testing of a product. The idea is to get a “good enough” product in…
Groupon recently unveiled a service that features premium deals on high-end brands and restaurants. Groupon Reserve has dining deals and will add travel, entertainment, and luxury products. It also offers a free online reservation service at top-tier hotels, salons and restaurants and offers diners discounts of up to 40%. The move demonstrates smart brand thinking as Groupon adhered to these important branding principles: Solve a problem. Groupon needed to grow beyond deals on massages and…
Bend your knees, swing your arms back and jump. No baby steps allowed. Business success in today’s insanely competitive world often requires marketers to make a bold move to differentiate themselves rather than take small steps and incrementally move forward. In other words, jump! CASE IN POINT: Georgia Tech’s recent decision to offer the first online master’s degree in computer science. Bold? You bet. The Atlanta-based University is making waves in business and higher education…
As you likely know, we’re big fans of metrics, quantitative analysis, and ROI. However, strict devotion to these tools without understanding the emotion behind decision making leads to suboptimal results. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that there’s a human being on the receiving end of the ad, email or message. People make decisions based on many factors, both rational and emotional. Savvy marketers get that. Money isn’t everything. We’re in the middle of college graduation…
Kudos to Michigan and Syracuse who proudly wore their colors during last night’s March Madness final four basketball game. Typically, the visitor wears their team color and the home team wears white. Since the teams were far from their home court, they both smartly opted to wear their brand color. Michigan’s is maize and blue. The first recorded association of any color with the University of Michigan was in 1859 when a ribbon of deep…
In the pursuit of more profitable sales, companies often add marketing initiatives rather than scrutinizing the ones they’re currently doing. Thus, already stretched employees are taxed with doing more, which often doesn’t equate to achieving more. The solution? Do less. Viva’s clients who cut their lists and FOCUS actually see an improvement in results. So, stop adding to your list and start excelling at a few things. Here are 4 tips to get started: Tip…
I confess. I care more about the Super Bowl commercials than the game. So, for those of you who also like to look at the business side of sports, here are 4 lessons to learn from this year’s big game: Lesson #1: Be consistent. I’m sure the folks at Go Daddy are bored of another ad with Danica Patrick. For the rest of America, we associate the brand with her, and think of them when…
