Author Archives: StratoServe

Understand needs early and avoid being let down

Understanding requirements early is the secret if you want to avoid feeling let down. It’s the secret to good school grades and happy customers in almost every field.

You got paid, but the customer does not use is bad news: You might feel good that you got paid and there are few customer support calls. But this could be a very costly strategy if many buyers are non-users. It turns the B2B buying center on its head. If many customers don’t experience the value of your offering, customer satisfaction, referrals, and market share can only go down.

Why Living your Value Proposition is a Key to Success in Business Models

If you can get your organization and partners to “live” your value proposition it can do wonders for your customer happiness and business model.

Why Google BARD will overtake CHATGpt

This is an exciting time to see how the Microsoft vs. Google wars plays out in natural language search wars between CHATGpt and BARD.

For this post, we focus on the ability of Google to find your search intent and try to give the best answer to not only your search question but your search intent.

Why Cleaning your direct mail list matters

In a digital marketing world of shiny new options in digital media, we underestimate the power of good old email. 60% small businesses do not use email marketing primarily because of all the glamorous talk of other forms of digital marketing. Compared to all other forms of digital marketing email marketing is most cost effective. One estimate puts $42 return on 1$ investment in email marketing.

Privacy: Direct Customer relationship data is more important than ever

Mailing list providers were the original third party cookies. They gathered contact details of different demographics and you could buy lists to mail (junk mail) to them.

Quiet Quitting does not work in the knowledge economy

From the Industrial age (Henry Ford/ Taylor), we moved to the service age, and we believe that Gen Z and younger Gen Y are confusing the upcoming knowledge economy with the service economy as they justify quiet quitting.

Why Apple privacy hurts display ads more than search ads

iPhones have over half of the US market and tend to have customers who have higher incomes. It turns out that only between 16% -37% of iPhone and iPad users allowed apps to share data.

Doctors with Fake reviews? Why big data can solve the problem

This post explains why businesses and customers look for 5-star reviews, how “fake it till you make it” works for companies and individuals, Why in the digital big data world, fake reviews will be found, and finally some tips to protect yourself; in the meanwhile, from fake reviews.

Why Authentic Value Proposition ?

The lingering pandemic, the Ukraine war, supply chain problems and inflation has all types of organizations reviewing their “value” proposition. The idea of an explicit contract in B2B and an implicit contract in B2C used to involve fewer parties. If there was a serious dispute there was arbitration, courts or government regulators who would step in and try to sort things out. No longer true in the world of instant social media. Think of Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase situation.

For everyday business it’s simply keeping your promises to your customers. To be fair, our experience is that Elon Musk is pretty good with Tesla in keeping customer promises. No matter how the Twitter acquisition plays out.

Since marketing is about customer value, it’s important to clarify the idea of value proposition in these challenging times:

Why B2B Technology markets makes switching too easy

B2B Technology markets can make switching by the customer too easy. Existing or legacy technology can become too cumbersome to use . Or refuses to realize its promise after trying for years. The client, in despair, becomes willing to try a new supplier. That supplier is willing to transfer the legacy system.

The solution is not to become sticky by merely embedding your technology in the customer’s processes. Or make the customer a hostage to your technology. Instead, it’s useful to think of what we learnt in the industrial B2B era as we continue to compete in the knowledge economy.

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