In the 1950s, the Philadelphia police referred to the day after Thanksgiving as Black Friday, due to all the people starting their Christmas shopping. A negative day for police, however, became a great day financially for merchants. Eventually, marketing savvy merchants became concerned about attaching a negative term like Black Friday to their best sales day. These merchants changed the ...
Many years ago, my old Malibu needed some work. I found a car repair business in a Christian directory that had a fish symbol in their advertisement. I gave them a try. It was a horrible experience. Their level of incompetence was staggering. When I challenged the owner, as a fellow Christian, to make it right, the owner laughed and ...
Early in my former consulting practice, a friend convinced me I needed to hire a salesperson. Weeks later, I hired Steve. The first call Steve went with me on was to a company that I knew desperately needed our help. But I had never closed the deal. That day, Steve told the prospect. “I’m not leaving until you sign a ...
In our changing culture, there are growing risks for the brands of our small businesses. When someone sees our brand images, they tie it to whatever messaging is attached. Recently, someone emailed me from an organization I was involved with decades ago. The signature line in her email had her name, title, then under her title it said, “she/her/hers,” then, ...
Recently, Bud Light experimented and embraced the “woke” agenda in their controversial ad with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney. Their decision didn’t go well for their beer sales. Considering the point of advertising is to increase sales, the fact that Bud Light sales decreased over 20% for weeks afterwards, doesn’t bode well for their experiment. Bud Light should have known their ...
When I was a child, our local shopping center, Truman Corners, creatively advertised a ping pong ball drop. A helicopter was scheduled to drop ping pong balls into the parking lot. The ping pong balls would be marked with potential prizes. This creative idea filled the parking lot with thousands of people chasing bouncing ping pong balls. The individual ...
Airbnb recently announced a new pricing strategy. Airbnb customers have been complaining about the company’s lack of transparent pricing, so Airbnb decided to embrace a more transparent model. If you review some past pricing studies, this is a risky, although more ethical, move. According to the Wall Street Journal, Stubhub discovered that 13% more people bought tickets when the pricing ...
As a teenager, working on my uncle’s farm, at noontime each day we turned on the radio to listen to the farm report, and to listen to Paul Harvey. Paul Harvey was a famous radio broadcaster who told fascinating true stories about famous people. Mr. Harvey would share surprising and inspirational details, but not reveal who the story was about ...
Years ago, I had trouble remembering which direction to turn my clocks when Daylight Savings Time approached. Then someone shared with me the simple phrase, “Spring Forward, Fall Back.” These four simple words helped me to easily remember to set my clock forward in the spring and back in the fall. Great marketers have learned that making things simple for ...
A Harvard Business Review article written by Christine Alemany focused on the changing landscape of customer trust. According to the article, building trust for your brand has become even more difficult due to the differences in information gathering by diverse age groups. Alemany discovered that older adults are more brand conscious and obtain their information from traditional news outlets. Younger ...
Equipping Others to Do Work Differently
