Say it Before Your Competitor Does One of the best ways to stake out a competitive advantage is to take credit for what everyone else in your industry is already doing. State “it” before your competitor does. This doesn’t mean you’re being dishonest – it means that you’re helping to educate customers about how your business works,…

Know What Your Customers Truly Value Success in business is all about focusing on the customers, right? We hear it all the time – “we value our customers.” “Customer service is our top priority.” So why do so many companies fail to pay attention to their customers’ wishes, goals and concerns when they’re doing their…

How to Start Strategizing for Your Marketing Message and Campaign There are many components to successful advertising and marketing messages, but the most important is strategy. With all the clutter and noise in the marketing landscape, it’s more important than ever for companies to have a keen strategic focus behind every marketing message they send. You need to…

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…

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…

Competitive advantages are not permanent. You need to continually adjust, adapt and evolve your competitive advantages and positioning to respond to changes in customer preference, challenges from competitors, and changes within the company itself. 3 Biggest Reasons Why Companies Lose Their Competitive Advantage – and What to do to Fix it.  1) Changes in Customer Preference Too many…

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…

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…