Advertising, Part 2: Wheres & Hows

My last article clarified the economics and effectiveness of advertising in raising brand awareness and familiarity. Because small businesses often initially limit their experimentation with advertising to magazines, newsletters, and sometimes web advertising, this article will focus on executing a marketing effort with these specific media. An old mantra of the advertising business is that…

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Marketing Portfolio Management in New Ventures

The best practices in marketing hi-tech new-ventures more closely resemble that of a targeted portfolio management than that of a general portfolio management. Within this logical construct for marketing and sales, expenses are allocated within a selected portfolio of activities that are dependent upon the economics of the market being served. Under modern financial portfolio…

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Trade Shows, Part 3: Maximize the Impact

In the second article of this series, we explored a model to show the value of trade shows. While our model demonstrated the possible value, it did not fully explore the means to maximize exhibit floor value. Maximizing the value of a specific marketing event requires integrating the event with our other marketing tools. In…

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Trade Shows, Part 2: A Value Model

Trade Shows are costly marketing efforts. They take sales people out of the field and restrict them to an 8X10 piece of carpet for a couple of days. What justifies the cost of trade shows? Trade shows are a marketing function hence they better perform a marketing task. In this case, they perform the task…

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Trade Shows, Part 1: Show me the Value

Trade Shows, Booth Duty, Event Calendar. Why do we do this? Where is the bang for the buck? If we are to conduct business seriously, we have to have reasons associated with our actions. We can’t waste our time and money on activities that don’t improve revenues or decrease costs. Yet, we attend trade shows…

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Marketing as Full Cycle: Jennifer Sherwood of Systems & Software

According to Frederick Webster of Tuck School of Business, marketing is charged with three distinct areas of responsibility: (1) communicate to the market the value proposition of their product for demand stimulation, (2) determine product strategy to improve their value proposition, and (3) craft the corporate strategy to capture the uncovered opportunities. While many new…

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Listening to Markets: Michael Alter of SurePayroll

When firms want to escape hand-to-mouth business and enter a somewhat predictable high-growth market, business leaders have to change from opportunism and cost based decision-making into a market driven mentality. This kind of a growing-up sometimes requires sacrificing immediate cash flow, exploration, and intuition while replacing it with investment, commitment, and data-based decisions. We may…

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Talking to Markets: David Freeman at Geodesic Systems

When company names appear in my column, I have noticed a trend of corporate officers contacting me to ask how I learned about their existence or got my information. Much to their dismay, I often reply that I did research to find them searching VC portfolios, i-Street lists, and of course, old May Reports. (So…

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Is Rolodex Marketing the Right Answer?

It seems to be a dominant philosophy among many managers that the mark of a great sales person is the size of their Rolodex. I call this “Rolodex Marketing.” The logic flows along the lines of: (1) Salespeople create and manage customer relationships to drive profitable transactions. (2) The more relationships salespeople already have, the…

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