Posts Tagged ‘marketing tactics’

Why Tactics and Execution goals matter

February 27th, 2010

Scenario : You have a good business growth plan – heck, you have a GREAT business growth idea. You’ve just delivered your elevator speech to the CEO and he tells you to pitch your idea to the executive team. You walk into the room and begin. First, the idea, the strategy, the market, the competitive landscape and the financial/operational goals.

Then, the CEO asks you. “How are you going to implement this?” Either you have a series of next-level tactics on hand or you fumble about how different members of your team will keep working hard to make this happen.

The meeting ends with no financing approved. What went wrong? » Read more: Why Tactics and Execution goals matter

What! Google actually uses Direct Mail to advertise?

January 8th, 2010

I answered a question on Linkedin some time back about what Google might be spending on its direct mail efforts to small businesses. This was a challenging one and I had to rack my brains to estimate the numbers. Thanks to Jevon Cole on Linkedin for steering me towards the right pricing for this.

According to the IAB, the US advertising spend was $300 billion in 2008 with 25% of that expenditure going into direct mail. Let me try to figure out Google’s spend:

» Read more: What! Google actually uses Direct Mail to advertise?

Retromarketing – Tormenting Customers and how they’ll love it

December 11th, 2009

retromarketing-tormenting-customers-and-how-they-love-itIt was a few years ago when I first read this HBR article on Retromarketing by Stephen Brown which was quite eye-opening.

The premise of this article was based on the fact that marketing folks always keep telling us to mollycoddle our customers and do things like customer care, customer delight, customer is king etc. etc. I agree with Mr. Brown to an extent; Some customers are uninformed and only focus on one attribute on a product, which is mostly price. » Read more: Retromarketing – Tormenting Customers and how they’ll love it

How to grab Market Share from an existing leader

September 27th, 2009

grabbing-market-share-from-market-leaderThis sure aint easy. You want to enter or expand in a market where someone is a dominant player who has excellent distribution, is strongly positioned as the leader and has a few brand extensions. What do you do?

Situation : You’re a runner-up firm in a certain industry and you want to enter/ expand. Start with the basics. Ask yourself what you would like to accomplish here. » Read more: How to grab Market Share from an existing leader

Market-Followers or How No.2 can be as good as No.1

August 14th, 2009

market-follower-strategies-to-ursurp-the-market-leaderClever firms are always looking for the next best thing that they can add to their product or service platforms and in the process differentiating themselves from their competitors.

If you’re No. 2 in a market, you could spend tons of time reinventing the wheel and trying to ‘discover’ something new or…

You could wait till No.1  aka the market leader has borne the costs of having a product development process, developing a new product or variation, educating the market about it, setting it into distribution and promoting it. » Read more: Market-Followers or How No.2 can be as good as No.1