Fear is one of the great barriers to career advancement. Sharon Price John’s fabulous career is full of lessons on how to get past those fears and get out of your own way. Being afraid… Read more »
Customer insight
Eyes glaze over when we talk about inflation? You’re not alone. But what you don’t know can hurt you.
Chart credit: https://www.macrotrends.net/2497/historical-inflation-rate-by-year For anybody born after about 1985, meaning most folks under 40, all this talk about inflation seems kind of old-timey. Indeed, as Public Radio host Kai Ryssdal (citing a story in… Read more »
Positioning: Beyond the Statement
Developing a positioning statement is often done as a fill-in-the-blank “Mad Libs” exercise. The power of insightful positioning, however, goes right to the heart of how you are creating value, and for whom. In marketing… Read more »
Thought Sparks Wrap Up – September 2021
Dear colleagues, Hey, everybody! We’re already through September?—?back to school, back to work, back to thinking about Q4! This monthly wrap-up of my weekly Thought Sparks news pieces will give you a short summary and… Read more »
Key Ingredients of a Killer Prototype
We often think of prototyping as something only a gifted designer or developer can do. But there are lots of examples in the real world of how ordinary people can pull it off. If you… Read more »
The Lesson of the Direct to Consumer Revolution: Strategy 101 still matters
Every so often a new business model, often enabled by technology, takes the world by storm, attracts a lot of hype, eventually proves unable to live up to the headlines and disappears or becomes a… Read more »
3 Ways to Completely Mess Up Customer Surveys
Customer surveys are everywhere – and most of them aren’t going to offer one ounce of insight. Instead, learn to use them properly and for the right reasons. Customer surveys are inescapable these days. They… Read more »
Not Buying It: When your biggest challenge is non-consumption
We’re used to thinking of competition as the biggest challenge for getting customers to buy from us. But a much bigger challenge is non-consumption – especially when the reasons people aren’t buying have more to… Read more »
The better your automated customer service options, the worse your customer service experience
The unintended consequence of so much high-quality customer service automation is that by the time your customers get to a real person, they are already enraged and their problems are mercilessly complicated. Yes, customer service… Read more »