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Comparative Advantage
If your market is saturated, it might be difficult to find a competitive advantage over others. Your products are likely identical, and your prices very much the same. Production is as optimized as it can be, and there are few to no differences between your and your competitions’ company structure. What you need is a […]
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Staggered Entry
Any entry into a new market needs to be taken in steps – the first of which is brand advertising. You need to build brand awareness and demand for your products long before you make your first sale. This can be costly, but not nearly as much as a premature product launch. Previously, I talked about […]
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TOWS
As you have probably learned by now, marketing is an on-going process of both self- and competitive- analysis. You need to understand who your company is, who your customers are, and who you are competing with – information that can stay fairly constant over time, or suddenly change overnight without warning. Analysis must start from […]
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Landscaping
The first thing any entrepreneur looking to enter the market must do is survey the landscape. While standing atop a hill and peering down at the city might sound like a fun activity, this has nothing to do with the landscape I’m talking about. There are three questions you have to answer in detail before […]
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Public Relations
PR can be a powerful weapon, but it is also a two-edged sword. Good PR can build your reputation in the community and better your chances at scoring new customers. Bad PR can damage your existing customer base and cost you much needed sales throughout the year. You can’t really predict what kind of PR […]
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Brand Advertising
Advertising can be broken up into two categories: product advertising and brand advertising. Both types of advertising have their uses and inherent strengths and weaknesses. Brand advertising can pave way for a new product release, and product advertising can enhance existing brand marketing strategies. Brand advertising is a powerful tool in marketing. Like product advertising, […]
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What’s the Point?
When I tell people I am in marketing, they assume I am in either sales or advertising. In fact, most websites that ask you to enter your profession lump advertising, sales, and marketing into the same category. In a world where few understand the differences between these three disciplines, what is the point of trying […]
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Negative Space
I read an interesting article in November’s issue of Marketing News. “Learn to Use Communication’s Negative Space,” by Prophet’s Kevin O’Donnell is a great piece on how to pull your marketing message out of the clutter of every day life. O’Donnell encourages the use of “negative space” in advertising. His most illustrative example was Charmin […]
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‘Tis the Season
The last two days featured a case study on targeted marketing and rebranding. A fictional bait & tackle shop tried to target its “perfect customer.” The first attempt was a miss and actually hurt business for the shop. However, it also yielded a great deal of information about the market and helped determine who the […]
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Story Tellers: Part II (con’t)
Yesterday, I gave you a hypothetical marketing situation. We run a bait & tackle shop. Having defined our perfect customer, we changed our store layout and image to fit them and waited to see how this changed our business. Today, three months later in the thought-experiment, we see business has declined in two of our […]