23 Apr, 2009
I saw on someone’s blog the top ten things not to do in your marketing plan. It is not useful to focus on negatives so I didn’t pay too much attention to the advice. However, it did inspire me to think about my top ten tips for a successful marketing plan.
Here they are:
- Have a realistic budget!
- Be different to your competitors!
- Be adventurous – take risks to stand out!
- Focus on keeping existing customers!
- Have a simple selling proposition!
- Understand the needs and wants of your existing customers!
- Find the best ways of getting your message to your best prospects!
- Make real claims for your product or service – don’t exaggerate!
- Have a mix of tactics – don’t put your eggs in one basket!
- Make sure you capture and respond to customer feedback!
Good luck!
21 Apr, 2009
Tender has several meanings in English that come from opposite ends of the spectrum. At one end tender, as an adjective, describes something that is soft, gentle or sympathetic. At the other, as a verb or noun, it is represents the formal offer or presentation of goods, services or currency in a business exchange.
Tender writing then has several usages. The gentle and beautiful writing of John Keats is tender. Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale gave the title to F Scott Fitzgerald’s famous Tender is the Night:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,  Â
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night…
And as poor Keats earlier in the Ode calls to the bartender for his draught of vintage we find ourselves with yet another manifestation of tender as a version of tending, that is looking after or attending to something.The other major usage of tender writing is the difficult job of writing business proposals to meet a specification for a project. This is not something that Keats or Scott Fitzgerald would attempt. It requires a very different style. Tender writing for business is technical and precise but at the same time needs to make a product or service attractive.
Why do we have two very different tender writers? Because the word is a convergence from two different Latin roots.
Keats type of tender comes from the Old French tendre, from the Latin tener ‘tender, delicate’.
Whereas the tender writing that Madrigal Communications undertakes has its origin in the Latin tendere stretch, strive, hold forth.Â
12 Apr, 2009
Our Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, apologised for losing his temper on a Royal Australian Air Force flight in January when questioned at the G20 last week. He had lost his temper because he had only been offered red meat as his meal.
It was bad PR for the PM because it overshadowed his participation in the success of the G20. It was made worse because his press secretary had previously denied it.
-6 to Kevin
The RAAF was portrayed as being deliberately disrespectful of the PM as part of a dispute with the Defence Minister.
-2 to the RAAF
For Malcolm Turnbull it was only a minor PR win when it should have been bigger. He is not getting much traction.
+4 to Malcolm
However, the Opposition’s Agriculture spokesman, John Cobb, announced that it was possible that Mr Rudd was just suffering from a lack of iron in his diet:
Farmers probably understand why he might have anger issues or a mental meltdown while on a red meat free diet.
He managed to deflect the potential damage to the livestock industry.
Ten points to John Cobb.
2 Apr, 2009
Niche (pronounced neesh or nitch) is a word used both in ecology and marketing.
Its original use is as a noun to describe a shallow recess, especially one in a wall to display an ornament. It came into English from the French verb nicher to make a nest.
In ecology niche theory describes how an organism or group of organisms is always competing with others for the resources they need to survive. A strategy to reduce competition is to find a niche that other organisms aren’t using or not using very well. Here is a short explanation from Dr Seuss:
And NUH is the letter I use to spell Nutches,
Who live in small caves, known as Niches, for hutches.
These Nutches have troubles, the biggest of which is
The fact there are many more Nutches than Niches.
Each Nutch in a Nich knows that some other Nutch
Would like to move into his Nich very much.
So each Nutch in a Nich has to watch that small Nich
Or Nutches who haven’t got Niches will snitch.
It is similar in business. Your business is competing hard for customers and you have to work very hard to keep them or they will get snitched.
One way to decrease competition is to use a niche marketing strategy, which concentrates on a narrow sub-segment of customers. First you identify the customer needs or wants that are not being satisfied by existing businesses and then develop specialist goods or services that do satisfy them.
A very quick way of estimating whether your business can develop a niche marketing strategy is to look at your most loyal customers. First, determine if your best customers are price sensitive and second work out if they share particular characteristics.
If the core customers are not sensitive to price it means you can create a more specialist product or service that might cost more but will still be desirable.
If the customers share characteristics it means you can create more targeted sales and marketing tactics that will produce a higher return on your marketing budget.
There is a useful prediction from 1989 (Laurel Cutler, quoted in Phillip Kotler 1997 Marketing Management p251):
There will be no market for products that everybody likes a little, only for products that somebody likes a lot.
del.icio.us
digg
Furl
Spurl
Technorati
Yahoo My Web