We’ve all heard the phrase ‘horses for courses’. Not being an afficionado of horse racing, I can’t give any advice on tips, and I wouldn’t know the difference between ‘good’ and ‘firm’ if it came up and hit me in the face. But the saying does hold true for marketing – where and how you[…]
My daughter had a simple maths problem for her homework this week: A furniture manufacturer raises its prices by 20%, but then sales fall by 20%. Did the business make more or less profit? The unschooled might say it remained the same, but of course it didn’t – if you increase 100 by 20%, you[…]
The first thing to understand here is that a product or service only has meaning from the point of view of the customer. We’re not interested in what you think your product or service is – you need to get into the minds of your target market and understand their definition. A product or service[…]
Top sports people know their competition. Tennis players spend hours analysing their opponents’ game. They try to find their weak spot, as well as identifying where their opponent might try to attack back at them. Then in the game itself they focus on the opponent’s weakness, sometimes relentlessly for shot after shot, game after game.[…]
Sometimes you come across a great entrepreneur who made a point of ignoring their market. Steve Jobs famously said that they didn’t do any market research for the Apple Macintosh computer because they weren’t building it for other people: “We built it for ourselves.”* Everybody else needs to do their market research. You need to[…]
Oh, don’t be stupid you’re thinking! Are you honestly telling me I don’t know what I do? Undoubtedly you know what you do in your office/factory/workspace, but that’s not what makes a successful business: it is understanding what you DO to your customers which really matters. How do you solve a problem for them? How[…]
If you were going on holiday, would you book the time off work, arrange your travel insurance and foreign currency, and only then decide where you were going? Or worse still, get in the car and head north or south without a map, compass (or sat nav) with no idea where you were heading? Welcome[…]