Kevin Harrington // marketing // blog

Posts Tagged ‘business’

Resignations have increased in the year to February 2010, despite growing fears over job security. Data collected from 43,312 individuals in 197 organisations also reveals that earning power has dropped dramatically in the past year, with ‘take home pay’ heavily influenced by where people work and what they do.

“It is clearly time for business to grow up. We can no longer afford to reward people with pay rise after pay rise especially as all the evidence suggests that money isn’t the main motivator anymore. Instead, employers must concentrate on building remuneration packages that incorporate earnings with development opportunities, offer flexible approaches to work and recognition of the need to better engage with staff.”

Read the rest of this article at the Chartered Management Institute site.

Surely it is time to take a better look at how we engage staff and to start using incentives and recognition tools to our advantage?

Are you focused on flogging stuff or building relationships? The difference is substantial but often misunderstood. 

Doug Levy has written an interesting article titled 5 principles of breakthrough success in the “Relationship Era”. Levy talks about the history and evolution of business through the following phases:

Product Era: The focus is solely on transactions.
Consumer Era: The focus is still on transactions, but the idea of trust enters the dialogue as a way to persuade people to transact more.
Relationship Era: Trust between a brand and consumer is mutual. Trust and transactions are seen as distinct, and both are important. 

I especially like his succinct principles for a relationship: 

Principle 1: Clarify purpose
Principle 2: Commit to sustainable relationships
Principle 3: Connect with authenticity
Principle 4: Treat customers as partners
Principle 5: Engage 

My thanks to Sarah Derry #sarahderry for telling me about this article. Read the complete article.

How on earth would you advertise your services if you were offering circumcisions? This is a synopsis of a Facebook conversation. 

POST: Circumcision leaflets through your door as junk mail, welcome to London, E1. 

POST: Are they advertising that they come at a snip of the price! 

POST: 20% off if you buy before the end of June. 

POST: Don’t even joke – there is one of those little clip-art stars in the corner with the caption “Bookings being taken for this summer”. Seriously, who decides to be circumcised because of a leaflet through your door? 

POST: They have to advertise via leaflets as getting product placement on daytime TV is a little tricky. 

POST: It would probably do very well after the money saving section on GMTV! 

Well, it all made me wonder. What other obscure services do you think are difficult to market?

Image via Wikipedia

Man and boy Scottish & Newcastle marketer Jeremy Blood said, in answer to “What brand do you most admire and why?:

Champagne. A brilliant combination. A simple gimmick (bubbles and a popping cork) global appeal, and ownership of ‘celebratory drinks’. And on top of that huge margins and enormous barriers to entry.

Excellent choice and an excellent answer. See his other replies to questions at the Marketing Society website.

 Jeremy Blood is the managing director of Heineken UK.

Cost plus pricing is on of the biggest evils within businesses. It appears the safe approach but fails to maximise opportunity. Also, taking this approach, sale prices tend to erode to the level of cost prices. This is unacceptable for most businesses.

There are in fact many different solutions to determining a price. Some of the ideas are: temporal/time based pricing; multidimensional pricing; risk based pricing; variable pricing. A chart showing these is available for download.

One of the concepts on the chart is the diamond-water paradox:

The diamond-water paradox is the apparent contradiction, or paradox, that although water is on the whole more useful, in terms of survival, than diamonds, diamonds command a higher price in the market.

Can you suggest any more approached to pricing that I can add to the chart?

I found this quote today:

I started the £1k FTSE 100 Confidence Project in January as a personal show of confidence in the UK equity market. I was fed up with the doom and gloom and was convinced that the equity market had priced in bad news. I invested £1,000 in a FTSE 100 ISA tracker from the Halifax and commited to reporting its performance on my blog.Speed Communications – Wadd’s PR Blog, May 2009

You should read the whole article. It’s good to see someone putting their money where there mouth is and keeping at it.

Words, okay. But definitions can make you think differently.

A skunkworks is a group of people who, in order to achieve unusual results, work on a project in a way that is outside the usual rules. A skunkworks is often a small team that assumes or is given responsibility for developing something in a short time with minimal management constraints.

Typically, a skunkworks has a small number of members in order to reduce communications overhead. A skunkworks is sometimes used to spearhead a product design that thereafter will be developed according to the usual process. A skunkworks project may be secret.

The name is taken from the moonshine factory in Al Capp’s cartoon, “Lil’ Abner.”

Now that sounds like a good idea for more than a few projects. For more on this see the skunkworks entry on Wikipedia.