Marketing
"We work closely with small companies from service to retail and identify their unique challenges and opportunities. Then we all work together to develop and implement strategies to maximize their growth potential."
“Businesses that don’t stand for something… don’t stand out”.
It’s simple, be passionate about your customers. If you’re passionate about people, if you’re passionate about life, if your passionate about what you do... they will come. It’s your passion that will help you to create an unlevel playing field. It’s your passion that will lead you to your differentiation and away from copying what everyone else is doing. No longer will you be constantly looking over your shoulder, preparing for attacks on your people and your product. Stand for something! Stand out! “It works every time”.
To consumers, most businesses appear virtually invisible. Why is this? Could it be that they all look the same, sound the same and act the same? The answer is YES! Nothing distract… nothing attracts.
The problem lies in the fact that marketing for most businesses is more about making safe choices. Strangely enough, that’s how consumers make their choices too. However, they perceive a safe choice to be a business that stands out above the rest. We all become familiar, faster with things that stand out. Making the safe choice, for most businesses means not standing out. It means choosing the easy road… the easy road is to imitate each other.
When enough businesses imitate each other they form herds. Once a herd is established they often form trade associations with the intention of learning more from each other, which results in looking and acting even more like each other. Once their business models begin to look the same, they become locked into other sameness. Their stores begin to look the same… the products they sell and the people that sell them do too. For instance, even though we know that consumers make buying decisions based on emotions, sales people are still being taught the same old seven-step analytical sales techniques the rest of the herd is being taught. They rationalize, “It must work… the rest of the herd is teaching it.”
The folly is that everyone assumes the herd knows where it’s going, but this kind of herd mentality is more a product of fear of failure than of innovation. Believing there’s safety in numbers, the herd continues to spend the majority of its time imitating instead of innovating.
When consumers can’t see, taste, hear, touch or smell the difference, there probably isn’t any. In consumer marketing when all things appear the same, consumers make their buying decisions based on price. Look at your sales. If the overwhelming majority of your sales are based on price, instead of differentiation, you’re closer to becoming a commodity than a specialist.