Archive for July, 2012

Why New Product Introductions Fail

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

Supporting a new product introduction can be easily compared to a juggling act. Lots of balls in the air. You have to get the right marketing tools in place, on time, on budget, to create the right impression on your target client or customer. Here are a few “Flaws” in planning…

Flaw 1: The company can’t support fast growth.

Flaw 2: The product falls short of claims and gets bashed.

Flaw 3: The new item exists in “product limbo.”

Flaw 4: The product defines a new category and requires substantial consumer education—but doesn’t get it.

Flaw 5: The product is revolutionary, but there’s no market for it.

If a product isn’t really ready for its introduction or is ill conceived, even the best marketing tools are of little help. Here’s an interesting look at why new products often fail from the Harvard Business Review.

Case study about marketing a new product introduction.

 

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Posted in Marketing, Product Introduction | 1 Comment »

An Effective Team Must Understand the Brand Message

Monday, July 16th, 2012

Have you ever been mountain climbing and connected by a rope to other climbers in your group? Has one of them gone over the side and the only way to save him and you is to keep the rope in good shape? Do you see how that could be a vision of how to run a company using a clear brand message?

I had the great opportunity to hear Walter C. Wright, the author of “Don’t Step On the Rope,” speak at Pete Michaels’ Vistage CEO group. Walter is a mountain climber and a person who helps corporate teams to be effective. He describes a leadership team as if it were a mountain climbing team. If they don’t have confidence in their leader and more importantly, if they don’t have confidence or even understand the brand message of the company, they can fall off the ledge and there’s no rope that can save them.

That’s why I always want our clients to completely understand the brand message, the phrase or idea that not only differentiates a company from all of its competitors, but is something that each individual in the company understands…

Communicate the Brand Message to Employees (more…)

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Posted in Branding, Marketing | 1 Comment »

Improve Your Website Search Engine Rankings with Up-to-Date SEO Techniques

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

Things are always changing with SEO and it’s important to remain up to date in order to continue to rank high in the search engines. In April of this year, Google released Google Penguin, which is an algorithmic change to cut the use of spam and to decrease search engine rankings of websites that use black-hat SEO techniques, which can include activities such as:

  • - Loading a website with keywords in the meta tags or content
  • - Cloaking, which is when content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser
  • - Deliberately creating duplicate content

While the above are things to avoid, here are some things to do on your web page to help maintain a high search engine ranking: (more…)

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Posted in SEO, Web sites | 1 Comment »