| |
| |
|
Marketing Information |
|
|
|
Think Creatively While Reinventing Your Marketing and Selling -- Its For Your Survival!
We live in a world that for many has become technology advantaged in business and life. Imagine, for a moment, just how communication, science, art, medicine, automation, supply chain and products have all been reinvented. Even consumers' behaviors have been unearthed and changed beyond recognition. Consumers have become more assertive, demanding, highly skeptical, and more cynical, less trusting and with less loyalty to brands and companies. With all the reinventing and shifting in a diversity of industries and cultures we find however, little has changed in the process of how marketers and sales proceed to understanding why consumers' buy and how they think. Most marketing methods and selling techniques probe for surface understanding and not the core emotions and feelings of consumers' behaviors. Marketing and sales people rely on worn-out familiar campaigns and techniques that simply obtain less than marginal results and then place blame on their products, services or the economy. This become more apparent with sales and marketing people in hot industries where demand exceeds supply - sales skyrocket with little effort or skill on the part of sales and marketing. Then, when supply exceeds demand and there are too many sellers chasing too few consumers' -- the blame sets in and the excuse making erupts, causing products and services to fail or drop dramatically below projections. Change doesn't come easy when you're entrenched in deeply rooted behaviors of which takes much courage to change. Change means thinking differently about how one does things, which sometimes goes against all that you were brought up to believe in. People who hold stubbornly to their view and can't envision a different world will fight to maintain their current one. To maintain a competitive edge in your business will require stepping outside your comfort zone and the traditional methods of conducting yourself in business. The world has become a melting pot of various nationalities and cultures creating the backbone of our economy. Regardless, if you have a world vision of your business or not, the effects of you succeeding are influenced by your understanding of how consumers' think and how they buy. Consumers' ask for one thing and do another. They make illogical leaps of judgment and come to unreasonable conclusions based on their experience, memory and unconscious thoughts. The truth is most customers form opinions about you before you ever get a chance to deliver your service or product. That opinion is formed mostly unconsciously. Customers' are your only business and requires you to reach beyond product features, benefits, quality and reliable delivery methods. Sales and marketing people service their consumers in a more efficient manner when they understand how consumers feel, think and experience you and your products and services. The interaction between the confidence of your marketing message and the confidence of a salesperson in his/her product or service sets the stage for how, when and why the consumer will or will not purchase goods and services. When a salesperson conveys confidence in his/her company, product and service, it delivers subtle nonverbal cues to the consumer. That confidence, if perceived by the consumer, as authenticity on the part of the salesperson, adds great persuasive power to the decision making of the consumer. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence and scientific brain research showing that human emotions and the unconscious plays a major role in consumer selection of products and services. As our multi cultural society matures; it becomes evident that those companies and individual who what to advantage themselves in sales and marketing must understand the perception and mind of other cultural groups. That will require a better understanding of your conscious and unconscious mind - how memory, experience, and associated emotions exert a force on the thinking and buying behaviors of consumers. According to Gerald Zaltman, Professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School -- says that 95 percent of consumers' thinking occurs in their unconscious minds. Much thinking surfaces through metaphors and consumers' memories, which are much more malleable than previously thought -- which is why "confidence" adds great persuasive power. Artificial confidence does not work, but authentic confidence will decisively engender a winning edge every time when a salesperson truly believes in his/her products and services. Fostering a shift in sales and marketing will require a deeper understanding of how pervasive the unconscious mind of the consumer works. Breaking into new ground requires breaking out of traditional thinking about features and benefits selling. You need to enter into the mental activity of unconscious thoughts, feelings, memories, intentions, metaphors and just how they direct consumers' attention, influence perception and manipulate their decisions and actions. 6 key strategic solutions for sales and marketing. 1. Metaphor making in the mind of the consumer is a powerful fundamental that helps them make sense of information received. When eliciting information from a potential client. I asked him what success felt like. His metaphor was; "Success feels like the power of driving a Porsche down the highway at top speed." Tying his metaphor to several service benefits closed the sale securely. Understanding and having collected a large range of metaphors consumers' use to think about you, your services and products enable you to sculpt a more effecting communication strategy and increase the potential of a purchase. 2. Improve your mental outlook about you, your products and services. "You Are The Message." Eliminate negative clues by preparing yourself with the confidence of a winner. Use friendly language and genuine enthusiasm; reflecting energy, trust and openness will open up the consumer when probing for their thinking and core metaphors. Assertive and outgoing personalities, regardless of ethnic background, will outpace those people whose characteristics display shy and timid behaviors. 3. Design your office, retail store layout, waiting rooms, ads and brochures that reflect the Metaphors of your market. Example of how one Doctors office focused on outpatients care as being more nurturing and responsive. Patients view rooms with chairs lined up in rows as boring, frustrating and long waits. The office was rearranged to promote friendliness and privacy and was supplied with several TV's and a computer. The results were a decline in waiting time complaints and patients felt they were receiving a better quality of care, referral rates increased more that 18 percent and patient cancellations decreased by 23 percent. 4. Build into your oral and written marketing/sales communications stories using metaphors gathered from your market. 5. Probing the mind of your customer/client requires you uncovering the metaphors they use when thinking about purchasing your products and services. Once you have uncovered their metaphors you can identify some or most of the important and hidden drivers of your customer/client buying behaviors. 6. Develop an organizational climate and a workplace attitude that strengthens sales and marketing creativity. This requires breaking into more boxes and not applying the metaphor that suggests you step out of the box. Breaking into more boxes enables you to gather gleaning new knowledge and will help pry you loose of conventional thinking. How you think is more important and will produce more productive and innovational ideas than what you think. Don L. Price: Coaching Minds to Succeed -- Author, Sales/Marketing & Positive Change Solution Provider, International Speaker & Mental Fitness Coach http://www.donlprice.com Invite Don to speak at your next Convention, Meeting or Retreat. Optimize your Power to Succeed with Strategic Performance Marketing/Sales and Success Coaching, for Reaching Higher Performance in Your Personal and Business Life. -- Seminars, Keynotes, Retreats, Consulting -- http://www.donlprice.com Subscribe FREE to Price on Success e-Newsletter http://tinyurl.com/5bz7w 101 W. Alameda Ave., Burbank, CA 91502
MORE RESOURCES:
Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
What Your Customers Want Your customers don't know what they want. And to assume otherwise is folly. Are You Guilty Of Interruption Marketing? You muted the commercials on the TV last night because you were fed up with interruption marketing. Ditto if you went through your mail to find most of it is junk. How Important is Your Marketing? Bob called last week from Phoenix, Arizona with some stunning news about his web site. He first contacted me in the fall of 2003. Marketing Tips - Ten Quick Marketing Actions It is often difficult to manage to do marketing tasks when you have a busy business or professional practice. Here are 10 ideas each of which take 5 or 10 minutes and can be done between appointments or when you take a break from working on a large project. Direct Mail Still Works! Direct Mail CampaignsDespite the proliferation of communication facilitators--mobile phones, faxes, emails, PDAs--the mail still plays a vital role in successful marketing. Direct mail marketing continues to be one of the leading methods for effectively reaching prospective customers because it can be focused, predictable and economical. Why Referral Business Is So Valuable With so much money invested on innefective advertising, it's time to look at some good old fashioned ways of generating new business. One tried and tested way is by referral. Happy Hunting! Before you ever get on the telephone, send a marketing piece or set up an appointment with a potential customer, you must first identify whom that customer might be. To do that, you will need to create an "ideal customer profile"-a profile of who would be the best possible prospect for you and whatever you are selling. More Marketing Dope Direct marketing can make you very successful, but you've got to understand the basics. Here are some more gems of the industry that can take you from being a diamond in the rough to the luminous bling-bling. How To Bond With Customers So That They Stay With You Longer How many of your customers are loyal customers? More importantly do you know why they are loyal customers?Customer loyalty has been a buzz term in marketing for some time and with good reason. Estimates suggest it can cost 5 times as much to get a new customer as it does to keep an existing one. Meaning and Marketing - The Trigger In previous articles under "Meaning and Marketing", we have learned about the verb "To Be" and that the name of God is I AM.Stephen Hawkings, the world's greatest mathematician, and author of several books on science and the Universe, was more or less a bum during his university years in England and some years thereafter. Making Networking Work Several years ago, "networking" was the hot buzzword. Everyone was talking about building their network, because this was the secret to becoming incredibly successful. How to Use Your Newsletter to Research Your Market A few decades ago, in the early days of automatic banking terminals, the management at Citibank made a somewhat reluctant decision to introduce automatic tellers. They were anxious to cut costs, but they assumed that customers would rather deal with human tellers, had they the choice. Where to Find Cheap Brochure Printing Whether it is for is a real estate listing, a trade show handout, a data sheet, or another application, brochures can be a great promotional tool. They can be very expensive or surprisingly affordable, depending on your needs and where you look. 3 Simple Selling Tactics The following 3 simple selling tactics produce sales by responding to the way customers normally think and behave. They work for any business - regardless of what you sell, how you sell or where you sell it. A Simplified Marketing Plan that Works! When I started my first business in 1981, I researched business plans and marketing plans. I looked at all of the formats and read a lot about the purpose of creating a business plan. Marketing on the Cheap: Write? Right!! We all know the value of writing articles for promoting your website or online store. However, writing articles to promote your old-fashioned, traditional brick and mortar business has been around forever. Educating Your Customers One of the biggest marketing mistakes businesses make today is failing to educate their prospects and customers about the unique advantages that are being offered to them. The cornerstone of any marketing plan should be to educate your customers. Corporate Cleavage I enjoy cleavage as much or even more than the next guy. However, after reading my latest issue of Men's Health magazine, I checked my Encarta dictionary and looked up the word "cleavage". The Biggest Needle In The Haystack Hello everyone! Have you ever been curious about something, and wanted to learn about it? If you're like me, I am a pretty curious fellow, I really like to learn.Where is the best place to start finding the information you are looking for? My choice for information gathering is the Internet!Where do you start your search for information? I use search engines, my favorite is Google. 11 Rock Solid Techniques For Generating Product Ideas Anytime Anywhere! Whatever business you are in, either online or offline, you've got to constantly generate business/product ideas.If you've ever wondered how on earth those big corporations and companies generate wonderful and irresistible products plus powerful and revolutionary ideas, here are the 11 basic principle behind it all and the greatest of news is that it can be applied to any business.
|
| Article List | Index | Site Map |
|
All logos, trademarks and articles on this site are property and copyright of their respective owner(s).
The comments are property of their posters, all the rest is Copyright © 2006 CanadaSEEK.com - All Rights Reserved. |
