Tag Archives: Strategy

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.

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.

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:

AIDA sales funnel and the buyer’s journey to purchase

Businesses tend to wonder about the effectiveness of their advertising spend in terms of what they actually sold that could be attributed to advertising.To understand how advertising works its useful to look at the hierarchy of effects AIDA sales funnel credited to Advertising Hall of Fame member Elias St. Elmo Louis in 1898. No that was not a typo and check out the history of this kind of thinking called Hierarchy of Effects in the article by Barry (1987).

This post was originally published on April 22, 2014. We have many readers asking about the connection between the AIDA sales model and the Digital Customer Journey or Digital Buyer’s’ Journey. We are delighted to update the original post on March 5, 2021. We hope that this will help all businesses come back after COVID as customers go through their AIDA process online.

“Getting found on Google” – how does Google think?

[Note: This post was originally published on September 5, 2017 and is updated with a new image and some edits on March 31, 2021 due to the interest of our dear readers. We also published a new post Google results are not organized alphabetically on March 31, 2021 given reader interest in the topic]

Instead of trying to second guess the latest algorithm that reportedly contains over 200 factors, it is far easier to intuitively understand the business of Google. And that’s not a secret and reading the Google founders story makes things clear and here are some quotes from the story- with some explanation

Five Tips to align your Website content to your Annual Report

A recent LinkedIn post discussed how there seems to be significant differences between what the biggest companies say on their websites and what they put out on the annual report. Naturally, the annual report is the more recent management thinking on all matters of the organization. In the pre-Google world one could argue that theContinue reading “Five Tips to align your Website content to your Annual Report”

Jack Welch GE’s 4 E and one P curve

Update and Caution: August 10, 2022: We are both elated and worried about the wild popularity of this post. Serious questions are being raised about Jack Welch’s style, as depicted in this post. See recent criticism by David Gelles in “The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy.” Some GE managers who worked during Welch’s time seem to agree though ex-Home Depot CEO Bob Nardelli is still a steadfast supporter of Jack Welch’s leadership style. Welch was widely considered the manager of the century. The Jack Welch century was the 20th Century. Do check out what seems to be working in leadership in 2022.: Leadership Style 2022: Jack Welch or Satya Nadella?

To evaluate managers GE started a system of differentiating managers on performance but were hard pressed to identify the characteristics that differentiated managers on the “Vitality” curve which is essentially a “grading” curve or graph for managers. The word “vitality” is confusing because it refers more to being vital or essential to the organization rather than  being “vital” in the “having high energy” sense. In fact,”Energy” is one of the 4 E’s but let’s go over the 4 E’s of GE leadership briefly:

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