If you want to start an extremely profitable company today, it needs to be built around patents, trademarks, or customer loyalty to particular lifestyle. This is one of the points Martin Lowy makes in his excellent Seeking Alpha piece, The 2-Track Economy: Employers Versus Moat Builders. The “moat” he mentions in the title of the article […]
How Size Matters in Brand Partnerships
Brand partnerships can be a great growth strategy for businesses as small as the health club on the corner or as large as Coca-Cola. But as with dating apps, you need to be extremely careful who you hook up with. One of the most important elements to consider is size. But don’t merely look at […]
How to Mold Managers That Propel Your Business Success
Here’s a shocking fact of U.S. businesses: Leadership training doesn’t typically happen until managers have been on the job for some 10 years. I think it’s easy to understand why this is so. Very often individuals sort of “morph” or evolve into management positions. It can happen several different ways: The organization grows and a successful […]
Explore This Business Cycle to Uncover Great Niche Market Ideas
They say fashions go in a 20-year cycle. It’s the same way in business – although I’m not exactly sure how long the cycle is. During this cycle you hear how all the “big guys” are chasing the little guys out of business. However, the tide does turn and eventually specialty stores pop up and […]
5 Name Branding Lessons from Unicorns
Unicorns definitely exist in two places: on elementary school kids’ back packs and among startups. It’s the second category that I’m most interested in, and today I want to look at the major unicorns to squeeze out some branding strategies. In the startup world, unicorns are companies with valuations greater than $1 billion that are […]
How to Harness the Simple—and Free—Secret to Increased Productivity: Gratitude
Could your business benefit from: Increased loyalty? Higher productivity? Fewer sick days? A positive attitude? An important key to gaining these advantages is simple…and in many ways free: Gratitude. A Harvard Mental Health Letter summarizes the findings of several academic studies on the impact of gratitude in our personal lives and in the workplace, and overall, the […]
How to Spend Marketing Budget Wisely: Invest Where Buyers Put Their Trust
There are two kinds of people in this great big world: People you know, and People you don’t know. The funny thing is that we overwhelmingly trust both of these groups…at least when we’re talking about consumers looking for recommendations prior to making a purchase. According to a Nielsen survey, “consumers trust real friends and virtual […]
How to Win When You’re Playing “The Name Game”
Is the name of your business a good fit today? Will it still be a good fit tomorrow? These are important questions, because you don’t want to get stuck in a situation like Overstock.com, which finds itself having to run ads explaining to people that they aren’t just a purveyor of overstocked items. Although the […]
Why You Need to Upgrade Your Onboarding and How to Do It
See if you’ve ever had a first day at a new job that went something like this: You spend a half hour or hour with someone in HR, signing papers. The person gives you a company manual and may go over a few essential rules. You meet up with your supervisor and walk around greeting […]
2 Simple Customer Experience Principles to Live By
Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers – if you don’t remember them, look them up on YouTube – used to have a short comedy routine about golf with a title something like, “The 37 most important things to remember during your downswing.” While the routine was especially hilarious to anyone who has ever taken a […]
