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 ...
My friend owns a chain of car dealerships. Due to the chip shortage, getting cars to sell has been a challenge. However, the limited supply has caused car prices to skyrocket. My friend’s peers are selling cars far above sticker price. As his team discussed this opportunity, they decided to take a longer-term view. In fairness to their local ...
Kathy and I were visiting a new city and wanted to experience local food. The hotel concierge recommended and called a restaurant for reservations. At first, the restaurant refused to take our reservation. Our concierge pressed on until we were finally promised a reservation at precisely 6:45, not earlier or later. The next night we were excited to try ...
CNN hired 700 people and invested $100 million to launch their CNN+ subscription service. Three weeks later their new leadership terminated CNN+. It didn’t take a lot of math to realize this venture was likely doomed to fail. CNN’s new leadership made a wise, but difficult decision to take their losses and terminate CNN+. Many failed ventures linger too ...
In the 1990s, I competed with banks that were violating banking laws to secure more loan customers. Many borrowers were being threatened, or even blackmailed, into doing business with these other banks. As a competitor, it was frustrating to lose deals because of illegal or immoral practices of other banks. Eventually, bank examiners shut down these banks for unsafe lending ...
Years ago, a family came to look at a used car I was selling. I decided that my bottom line was the car guide’s stated book value. The father was determined to get a great deal and tried to negotiate the price even lower. I considered his offer until I heard this man’s daughter say, “I love this car, Daddy.” ...
On inauguration day, President Biden proclaimed he was going to administer 100 million vaccine doses in 100 days. The day of that pronouncement, the former administration administered 1.5 million vaccines and the previous week’s average was 966,000 doses a day. Many might call this “sandbagging.” Sandbagging is when you lower expectations so that you can exceed your goal later. In ...
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