‘Marketing/Sales’ Archives
Customer Engagement in Product/Service Development – new hints from Nokia
It is widely accepted that the more closely tied, integrated even, customers are in your development process for new products and services, the more likely success will follow. An April 13, 2008 article in the New York Times Magazine, “Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty - why a corporate ‘user anthropologist’ is spending so much of [...]
Book Review: Outside Innovation by Patricia Seybold
May 5th, 2008 The transformation of “customer driven”, “customer-centered”, “customer-defined” from just empty buzzwords in the latest management books to central values, key strategic skills is continuing. Patricia Seybold’s 2006 book Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future (Harper [...]
Must Read Web Marketing Book: D. M. Scott’s “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”
Michael Volpe, VP Marketing at Hubspot, the web marketing software company, pointed me to this book in one of his presentations. I have been sufficiently impressed by the quality of HubSpot's work that I ran over to my local library and signed it out. The New Rules of Marketing & PR is a breakthrough book for me about the new world of [...]
“Management Notes – the blog” Goes Mobile
Last night I attended a meeting of the Web Innovators Group here in Cambridge. Among the new businesses that caught my eye was Mofuse.com a mobile site creation company. As I have been learning, the next phase of the Web is emerging on hand held devices. There may be 600-700 million PCs in the world, but there are already over 2 billion cell [...]
If Content Is King on the Web? – What Are the Best Modes of Communication?
If you are trying to build traffic and adhesion for your business on the web, "content" is central to any strategy. But, what is this "content"? How do you decide what the content should be? The answer to this question probably lies in some basic thinking about who your target customers are. In addition it would be useful to think of the [...]
Making Sense Out Of Web Marketing – HubSpot.com
When you recognize that well over ninety percent of product and service searches done by business people start on the Web and 98% of those start with Google, the importance of web marketing in the BtB world is beyond obvious. Add to these now old facts about business peoples' behavior, the increasing role of the social web and you have a mix that [...]
Book Review – Join The Conversation: how to engage marketing-weary consumers with the power of community, dialogue and partnership by Joseph Jaffe
In my continuing search to understand more about web-marketing, I have now read through Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing-Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue and Partnership by Joseph Jaffe (Hoboken, NJ: Joseph Wiley & Sons, 2007). This book is written in a somewhat tiring style of froth, frenzy, and chattiness. [...]
Book Review – Marketing to the Social Web by Larry Weber
Marketing and selling over the Web has been a required activity for almost every business I have been involved in for over ten years. In the last couple of years, the web has continued to evolve and now in some undeniably novel ways. The most notable are the appearance and enormous growth of "communities" or "social networks". It is clear that the [...]
Product Line Analysis or Knowing Where the Profits Are
An important step for every business manager is to understand where profits are coming from. Too many managers are relying on the basic Profit and Loss statement that comes to them from their accountant. This is not always a useful management tool. Lets take a look at a situation where a web-based services company is experiencing good growth [...]
“Moments of Truth” and Service Operations
We have recently added a new feature to our operations improvement work for services firms. To improve the productivity, responsiveness, and quality of services, a common and very valuable approach is to organize a cross-functional team and value stream map the activities. This quickly produces many opportunities to improve flow, simplify tasks, [...]
