Culture is a key piece of operational efficiency. A good company culture builds trust, inspires, and creates an engaged workforce. Innumerable books and articles have been written about creating culture, and entrepreneurs who neglect to build a good culture do so at their own peril … But building culture in the planning stage is difficult, …
If you are original, you have to be original. Copying may be the sincerest form of flattery, but the uniqueness of your product and service deserves a unique marketing strategy. [This may be true, but keep it in check.]
A key component of all sales and marketing is branding. Branding is about storytelling and trust-building. The core principals of branding usually focus on purchasers in a broad sense, not necessarily focusing on how branding influences buying and decision-making. Branding is key to marketing, but it has to be balanced with and backed up by …
Unlike other modules, with this unit, you have no particular counterforce. When you’re thinking about your ultimate customers, you’re really thinking through who you want to be as a company. No right answer exists, but all companies and entrepreneurs need to know who they want to be. Thinking about the customers you ultimately want to …
Often, the impulse is to just get started. You don’t know what you don’t know. A business plan is only as good as the paper it’s written on, and everyone, according to Mike Tyson, has a plan until they are hit in the face. However, planning is essential. Abraham Lincoln is wrongly attributed as saying, …
Established companies with years of experience have advantages in branding. Corporations have the ability to simultaneously call upon their history (their founder story) or develop a narrative fit for the modern day — or both. Corporate brands can use their founder when it suits them or their employees or their customers (or whatever else a …
When you use a reiterative process, you may not know precisely how your customer will use your product or service, and if you are in a good market, you may be able to get away with this. Some companies may not know initially what they want to be or what their value proposition is, but …
To grab market share, a product must be demonstrably better than the current solution. By releasing your product early, you risk not having a product that is at that level, which will disappoint customers. This may create a challenge that has to be overcome later.
Not everyone can save the world. While grand designs are important and inspiring, a healthy dose of realism is equally important. What can realistically be accomplished in the near term – not some lofty grand vision – by your organization with the resources at hand?
