The fewer resources you have, the more focused you need to be. This is the Importance of a niche market and it is the essence of the concept of strategy. Strategy is nothing but answering the question: “where will we focus our efforts?” By focusing your efforts, given your limited resources, you allow for two powerful…
How to become customer oriented in your business? You can summarize most business strategy advice, most business development guidelines; entrepreneurship tips and marketing and sales recommendations in this one sentence: get closer to your customer. By focusing your business outwards, towards the customer, instead of inwards, towards your operations, a small miracle happens: you start…
Marketing plans to support international expansion of an engineering firm
If you starve your body from an essential vitamin, you will in due course experience symptoms associated with the deprivation. A doctor will be able to recognize these symptoms and recommend the relevant vitamin to turn things around. The same applies to a business. If certain key ingredients – let’s call them “business vitamins” –…
One of the most asked questions on Google relating to marketing consulting is “What are the duties of a marketing consultant.” The problem, of course, is that these days anyone can call themselves a “marketer”, and a “consultant”. The term “marketing consultant” combines two of the most overtraded words in business. No wonder no-one knows…
It is interesting that entrepreneurs can be both very busy, stressed and hardworking on the one hand, and on the other be relaxed in how they manage customer relationships. They are essentially operationally driven, but customer casual. They don’t know what their customers think. They don’t know where else their customers shop. They don’t know…
If you are in a services business, you are primarily relying on building a good relationship with your client. This relationship determines the success or failure of your business and should be actively managed. In the beginning, the greatest hurdle to a productive relationship is establishing trust. Then, as things mature, it becomes a…
This is the question that many entrepreneurs don’t know how to answer succinctly. Even more importantly is whether they can answer it without defaulting to using “low price” as the primary reason. This is especially important because justifying a purchase on price does not offer you the best chance to survive long-term. The cheapest brands…
Do you need to do marketing in your business? Or only sales? Doing marketing activity can feel like such a waste of time. It takes a long time to show results – if it even shows results. Actually, it feels like a gamble, and as a business owner you do not have money to gamble.…
When I started my career in marketing back in 2002 at Robertsons – the same guys that make the spices, – the first thing I was given was a blue book full of charts and tables highlighting the market share performance of the brands I worked on over the most recent two months. Back…
