thinking/critical

All business owners must differentiate or compete on price, but the stakes are much higher for designer businesses. Differentiation on design is the primary argument for maintaining higher prices, and failure to do so undermines the entire business premise. Do you know which questions to ask when establishing your pricing strategy?

Of all the companies that use the Internet for business intelligence, those who have a talent for finding the meaning and patterns behind the noise will benefit the most.

or Distilling customer relationship publishing into one simple blog post     I read dozens of business books and articles every month, and I look for common threads between them. Not surprisingly, I find more common thought than innovative or divergent thought in business theory. In general that’s good, because it means that ideas are [...]

People are getting all wrapped up in social media, thinking social media is the point. Social media is just a delivery device – a delivery device that any junior high school student can master. Marketing is the point, and content is the requirement.

The biggest danger to a business owner is lack of originality – generally demonstrated by virtue of getting trapped in his or her industry’s trends. Industry trend following simply turns your business into a commodity business. Avoid the trap, and maintain your margins.

Websites, social media, blogging, and other forms of interactive marketing have greatly enhanced the marketing potential of most organizations. But beware the temptation to believe that these are all you need, or that any of them are actually “free!”

The good work of evaluating comparative risk can be undermined by basic human frailty. Today’s article takes another look at the challenge of choosing.

The changes you choose to make now will have tremendous impact on the success you can expect in the future. Too many companies are cutting loose important (strategic) talent, eliminating their advertising budgets, changing their marketing strategies, and reducing their operations to customer-unfriendly shells in fear-fueled efforts to survive.

Our increasingly complex world creates consumers who seek familiarity and recognizable patterns to ease their decision-making. Business owners who sell their differences while making themselves seem very familiar will achieve the greatest success.

In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan – the modern media world’s most prescient cultural forecaster – said “we are always living way ahead of our thinking.” This article examines how that truth influences most business failure to successfully market products to customers.