Tradeshows

I was at a tradeshow this past weekend for the skincare industry. While it was obviously geared for this particular industry, a lot of what I observed was no different than other tradeshows I’ve attended.

Here’s what typically happens:

You meet your competitors, and unless there is a Hatfield-McCoy relationship, you can actually build some goodwill. [...]

Understanding What You Really Sell

I am working on a new project that started with one purpose but morphed into another because of one “little” question: What is it we are really selling? At first glance, the answer may be obvious, but as you dig deeper and talk with your customers, you’re likely to find there’s more to it [...]

How Well Do You Know Your Audience?

Last week, Next Great Thing reported on their Global Youth Survey: Social Media (which I found via PSFK). While the survey’s intent is to show “how young adults are communicating online, around the world”, the results also show that we may not know who it is we are targeting online.

One key result (quoted from [...]

Establishing Priority Markets and Putting Them to Work

Yesterday, I discussed how you should prioritize your markets or segments with 12 different levels, each with some combination of volume, profit and potential. You could easily consider these as A, B, C and D targets such that:

A includes high profit and high potential accounts or customers
Bs are low profit but high potential markets
C [...]

Prioritizing Your Marketing Efforts

While doing some de-cluttering, going through old files, I came across a paper I wrote during my MBA years. The research focused on developing a model for determining the net present value of brand equity. One key piece included a table guiding the user on how to prioritize the markets or segments you’re [...]

What Determines a Brand’s Value Part 3

Here we have arrived at the third and final set of components making up a brand’s value. You can find the first twelve in my posts from Monday and yesterday.
Your staff and intermediaries. Everyone who touches your product, no matter how much or in what way, impacts the value of your brand. [...]

What Determines a Brand’s Value Part 1

When you talk to most people about brand management, they speak in terms of basic marketing. Others think of basic branding—coming up with a hip name, obscure logo and fluffy positioning.
Brand management is about building brand value. It’s about making a brand worth more than it costs to maintain it. Managing a [...]

Dead Inventory

I was trading e-mails last week with a friend of mine in the foodservice industry, and he mentioned an issue his company was having with some dead inventory—product in house that they couldn’t sell. The next day, I had someone else question me about the same subject.
First, it helps to understand why you ended [...]

Break Free

Some of the most common quick-run-to-the-grocery items—milk, eggs, bread—generally find themselves in the farthest reaches of the store, accessible only through a labyrinthine journey through the maze of aisles.
Of course it’s done purposefully. The stores want to you purchase more than you intended. And their research, for which they pay dearly, supports the [...]

Test Easy

The web is making testing ideas, concepts and even entire marketing campaigns a whole lot easier. I’m not talking about online surveys. Unless those are tightly controlled, your results will have little meaning.
What I am referring to are the various spaces across the internet where you can try different things here and there. [...]