By Francis Moran
I’ve been doing a lot of work with clients lately on refining their messaging and marketplace differentiation. It has always been clear to me that this is not a trivial thing. Unless you can carve out a unique value proposition for your offering, and communicate that proposition in an arresting and compelling fashion, you’re dead in the water. What I am increasingly coming to understand, however, is how courageous companies need to be in doing so.
Okay, maybe courageous is going too far; courage, after all, is reserved for heroes. Maybe daring is a better word. Here’s what I mean.
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By Daylin Mantyka
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are copyblogger and Read Write Web and three great articles from Fast Company.
Forget the mission statement. What’s your mission question?
Questions (as opposed to statements) can provide a reality check to a business and are designed to keep a company focused on what matters most, writes Warren Berger.
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This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from June 2011. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran
Marketers are well familiar with the concept of segmenting their marketplace. Segmentation is the process of dividing a broad and undifferentiated set of consumers into ever-smaller segments until you have identified that group of potential customers that is the best match possible for your product or service. My wife is also afflicted with this contagion we call marketing and that gives rise to some strange conversations in our household. One such conversation a few years back resulted in our developing an easy-to-understand explanation of market segmentation we refer to as finding your gay Acadian dog lover. The key to segmenting the marketplace is to identify those traits — some demographic, some taste-based, many certainly geographic — that define the customers most likely to be interested in your product or service. Not only does the process tell you a lot about who you’re trying to sell to, it also gives you a lot of insight into how you might reach them.
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By Jason Flick
We made a very happy discovery this year at Mobile World Congress (MWC) and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES): There’s a $200-billion market out there for the taking. A market in which almost every customer is unhappy with dated products and overall experience, but expected to tolerate regular price increases.
I’m talking about the global TV market (video on demand, cable, satellite, IPTV), which totaled $137 billion in the first half of 2012, according to Infonetics Research.
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By Francis Moran
I gave a presentation yesterday to a new networking meeting, the Montreal Startup Breakfast Club. I talked about developing a content marketing strategy, and reviewed the rigorous methodology we have developed to govern our own internal content-marketing activities as well as those of clients. The novelty of using the term “content marketing” was evident to the people in the room and my presentation was well received, notwithstanding my explanation that I use this relatively new term to describe things I have been doing all my working life.
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