On the way to work this morning, I’ve been reading a book by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. And what particularly piqued my interest this morning was Murakami talking about his time in Tokyo when he ran a small jazz club…
You could actually use my horrifying train journey at the weekend to improve your business sense. Not only did the train manager make mistakes, he missed an opportunity…
Good question yesterday from Shortcut reader Mark E… He wrote in about a point I raised in yesterday’s issue. I mentioned that whenever you make a free offer, you should make sure you make potential customers aware of what it would cost if it weren’t free.
A genuinely free offer is a great offer. And it’s an offer that could work very well for your business when attracting new customers. So, how do you break down that resistance to the free offer; how do you get your customers to see that your offer is genuine?
As I said in my original article back in March, “Whatever idea you’re communicating – advice, news, a product or service, a thought – that idea must take priority in the message.” Here’s the problem, though. People love being ‘original’.
This morning I just finished re-reading David Ogilvy’s Ogilvy on Advertising… If you’re in a business which involves communicating ideas to customers – and let’s face it, I’m not sure there are any that don’t – I highly recommend reading it. There are so many ideas that Ogilvy discusses that I’d be here all day telling you about them. Right now I just want to share one overall idea Ogilvy’s book kept going back to…
Michael argues that “the information you get from your customers about the sort of products and services they want can be misleading. Yes, they’ll tell you what they want or like. But it will be what they want to believe they want or like. Not what they really do.” I agree that information customers give you about what they want can be misleading, but I don’t think it should be dismissed…
They aim to provide that market with the best product they can (in the case of The Wire and The Office it’s by being authentic). They tailor the product to the specific market – and only that market. They don’t try to please everyone, they just try to please the market they originally identified. They create a valuable product for that specific market. Then something very interesting happens…
I’ve watched incredibly intelligent people shoot themselves in the foot over and over under the curse – they assume they know what people want, what the market asks for, but really they have no idea…