First Amazon, now Dorothy Lane Market ends advertising and focuses on offering customers value. “We realized that we couldn’t give club members the deals that we wanted to give them if we continued spending $5,000 to $10,000 a week on print advertising” More in this Fast Company article: Dorothy Lane Loves Its Customers
Category Archives: Best Practices
Care and Feeding of Your Harshest Critics
Marqui is paying people to test drive and blog about their content management system. From Marc Canter on the origins of the idea: When I first came up with the idea – the question was poised “what if they blog something negative?” My answer was “that’s a good thing! Can you imagine how powerful it …
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More Slack Keeps Projects on Track
Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of ’emergency’ is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning. – Dwight D. Eisenhower Swap …
Find Failure Fast
“If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.” – Thomas J. Watson Sr, founder of IBM “…fail faster so [you] can succeed sooner.” – David Kelley of IDEO I’ve got any number of projects in the works at any given time (current count is north of 20). Last year, there was …
Cost of Stolen Towels Comes Out of Marketing Budget
A couple years back, Amazon attempted two things: Advertising in print and on television. Charging for shipping. They found little return on the first, and a found a huge backlash against the second. Amazon now finances their Super Saver shipping with their advertising budget: NY Times – Amazon Tries Word of Mouth Holiday Inn just …
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Sales Clerk Shops Competiton With Customer
Until now there were only 5 responses you’ll receive when asking a store clerk about an item: “Yes, we have it. Allow me to get it for you.” “Yes we have it. It’s in aisle 4, I’ll show you.” “Yes we have it. It’s in aisle 4.” “No, we don’t carry it.” “No, we don’t …
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Success Comes in Small, Cheap Projects
Instead of spending milions of dollars on “The Superbowl Ad”, why not spend that money cranking out beermat campaigns, till you find one that really works? Using beermats in small, test markets, you could easily create 50, 100 (500? Who knows?) campaigns for the price of one decent Superbowl/TV commercial. It would be a simple, …
5 Tips For Better Customer Interviews
The easiest way to collect interesting, usable data from a research effort is to blend into the background of the subject’s life. Media journalists know this – that’s why they’re embedded in the presidential campaigns and in the military actions. To give honest unselfconscious, response, subject’s need to be comfortable with researchers – as peers, …
Six Step Process to Motivate Others
In a highly collaborative working environment, the traditional hierarchical relationship between employees doesn’t exist. The result is peers making requests to one another to move their respective projects forward. More akin to a volunteer organization than a button-down for-profit business. The best volunteer organizations use a 6-step process to motivate peers in assisting. This is …
Yes, and – not But
Improvisational comedy, like all team sports is about effective, high-energy, spontaneous collaboration. One of the seven major tenets of Improv is building off each person’s comment and suggestion with “Yes, and…” rather than dismissing it with a “but…”. “Yes, and…” extends, explores, and enhances the previous suggestion – building trust among all the team members, …