Has Your Attention Span Improved In The Last Few Years?  Guess What, Neither Has Your Customers’!

Has Your Attention Span Improved In The Last Few Years? Guess What, Neither Has Your Customers’!

Tips for learning what matters most. We are living in fast moving, content rich, and information overload times. We can no longer message the way we have in the past. Look at your brochures and website, along with your sales presentations. It is likely loaded with “marketing speak” aka, “blah, blah, blah.” Personally most of…

4 Criteria to Differentiate Your Marketing Claims: Avoid the Commodity Plague

While all businesses know, at least theoretically, that differentiation is one of the major keys to success, it is often difficult to find true differentiation anywhere. Company after company offers up the same products and services, as well as the same claims of excellence, e.g., “we are customer focused,” followed by ditto mission statements. It is not…

Alibaba’s Competitive Advantage Threatens to Eclipse eBay & Amazon

The Economist reported that Alibaba.com handled $170 billion in e-commerce sales last year – that’s more than Amazon and eBay combined.The company is poised to become the world’s leading e-commerce business and inevitably the most valuable company… ever. As it prepares to go public, it could easily eclipse Facebook, which at the time of its own IPO was valued…

Yahoo! Finance: ‘Relevant Selling’ Teaches Businesses How to Sell What Customers Most Value

FORT LAUDERDALE, FL–(Marketwire -03/22/12)-  Jaynie L. Smith, CEO of marketing/management consultancy, Smart Advantage, Inc., follows up her best-seller with “Relevant Selling: Research Proves Customers Value More then Just Price” (www.smartadvantage.com), a guide for taking the guesswork out of sales and marketing. “To become relevant, businesses need to discern and address what customers really value,” Smith says. Surprisingly, less…

Capitalizing on the Potential ‘Made in USA’ Competitive Advantage

Recently I was interviewed by New York Times journalist Elizabeth Olson who asked what my thoughts were on “Made in America.” This past week, USA Today published a similar article titled Made in USA Making a Comeback as a marketing tool.  And Barron’s just featured “Made in America” as a cover story for their January 28th issue.  Barron’s cites that…