We have disbelievers in our midst! Among our loyal flock of AdVerb subscribers there are those who profess to embrace our principles but who flout at least one of them conspicuously. I’m referring to those executives who claim to be Relationship-centric Marketing aficionados but who, nonetheless, invest their scarce promotional dollars in golf days, boxes [...]

How to develop an ideology-based marketing strategy. So you think you’re going to publish a newsletter? Hey, that’s not a bad idea! If you make it an e-mail newsletter — like the one you’re reading now — it’s a particularly cost effective exercise. Your distribution costs are nil. Your publishing costs are equivalent only to [...]

Wastepaper baskets, the world over, are full of them. In fact, if there were ever a competition to judge the most self-indulgent of all business communications, the newsletter would have serious competition from only the corporate video for first place! A tragedy, when you consider that newsletters have the potential to be by far the [...]

I’m sure you’ve attended one of those seminars where a self-proclaimed expert wows the audience with his or her tales of ‘awesome customer service’. Have you ever wondered whether the long-term success of a business really does rest in the hands of grinning bellhops, airline stewards who forward-guess your every need, and receptionists who answer [...]

A message for those business people who insist on competing on price: go ahead! That’s right. If you have a cost advantage, flaunt it. Cut your prices, build marketshare, consolidate that cost advantage and annihilate your competitors. So what’s the catch? Well, to successfully compete on price, you need to be able to manufacture, market [...]

At best, most marketing communications are irrelevant to most of their recipients, most of the time. At worst, these communications run the risk of damaging the very relationships they are supposed to be cultivating. The problem is, from a marketing department’s perspective; every relationship looks like a sales opportunity. Accordingly, marketing (and sales) people tend [...]

How to use the virtual world of the Internet to multiply the effectiveness of your real-world marketing activities. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel that managing a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ business is downright unsexy! Particularly when stories abound of Web entrepreneurs who have reinvented business as we know it (and become [...]

How to sell expensive (or complex) products and services [Listen to a seminar on this subject!] If your organisation sells expensive (or complex) products and services, odds are, you get most of your new clients by ‘word of mouth’ or referral. If you’ve tried your hand at advertising, you’ve probably discovered that, even if an [...]

As many of you know, I’ve been splitting my time between Australia and the US for the last six months or so. I’ve been interested to see that, although I’ve cut my available capacity in Australia by almost half, our volume of Aussie sales has stayed exactly the same (in fact, in recent times it [...]

Imagine you were to awaken one morning suffering from a strange disorder: one that rendered your eyesight unreliable. When you open your eyes, your bedroom appears roughly as it did the night before. Your bed is below the open window, and your dresser is still adjacent to the door. However, a second look reveals that [...]