Top Reasons Why Good Customer Service has Vanished I’m not the first person – and I won’t be the last – to comment about how lousy customer service has become. At far too many companies, customer service is suffering – whether it’s due to bad hiring, bad training, overworking and underpaying their people, or just the…

Why You Need to Develop Your “Elevator Pitch” We’ve all heard the concept of the “elevator pitch.” If you had 30 seconds riding in an elevator with someone who was crucial to the success of your business, and you had one chance to sell yourself, what would you say? How can you succinctly encapsulate the best attributes and…

What Deflation Means for Your Business As if business leaders didn’t have enough to worry about in the tumultuous times that we’re in, now some economists are worried about the possibility of deflation. What is deflation, and what does it mean for your business? In “normal” economic times, prices tend to rise year after year…

The best businesses to be in are the ones with high barriers to entry. Think about it – why do doctors and lawyers and dentists earn so much money? Because there are barriers to entry – medical school, the bar exam, dental school – keeping people from getting into these professions. That keeps the supply scarce…

Let’s look at some of the biggest and most overused clichés in  marketing: “quality, value and service.” These are used far too often in marketing messages for all kinds of companies. It gets to the point where the messages and even the words themselves can become interchangeable. The next three marketing taglines are just ones I made up on the…

It’s more important than ever for companies to differentiate themselves in the market, because all of your competitors are saying the same thing. So much of marketing messaging nowadays just runs together – it all starts to sound like “Blah, blah, blah…” and people tune it out. I tend to pick on the insurance industry as an example of…

When trying to create competitive advantage, many companies fall into a familiar trap – they allow themselves to be defined by the limitations and assumptions of “the business that they’re in.” For example, consider the soft drink industry – Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other smaller regional brands. This industry is faced with growing media scrutiny and public…

I get the feeling sometimes from watching TV ads that a lot of people in the advertising industry would rather be artists, movie directors or comedy writers. Too many ads seem like they were made with the goal of getting laughs, dazzling the audience with visual tricks, or (in the worst cases) impressing other ad…