Category: business
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Building a Brand In a Recession
The recent recession saw sales of condoms, guns and burglar alarms soar. This is because, when fear enters our mind in terms of losing our job or of not being able to pay bills, we focus on two of our most basic drives: fear and sex. The key to selling and building a brand during…
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Random Promotions Beat the Peter Principle
TheĀ Peter Principle states that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence” (discussed previously). This principle is typically observed when promotions are rewarded based on an employee’s ability in their current position and provided there is sufficient difference between the two positions. In such circumstances, is there a simple way…
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Narratives for Selling Premium Goods: The Grey Goose Story
People want to pay more in order to own luxury goods, but you need to give them a reason to do so. That excuse? A compelling story. One man that subscribed to this idea was Sydney Frank, as is evident from the strategy he developed for Grey Goose: ļ»æthe ‘superpremium’ vodka thatĀ Barcardi bought for $2…
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PlentyofFish and Unusability
In an early 2009 profile of Markus Frind–the founderĀ and CEO of the online dating website PlentyofFish—Inc. briefly touched on the topic of the site’s famously bad user interface, with Frind explaining why heĀ believesĀ that, sometimes, user experience should take a back seat as a better experience isn’t always linked to greater profits. ļ»æPlenty of Fish is…
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WordPerfect Business Advice
In 1980, as a $5-an-hour part-time office manager,Ā W. E. Peterson joined the small company that would go on to becomeĀ WordPerfect Corporation. Then, twelve years later, after helping grow the company to half a billion dollars in annual sales and becoming the Executive Vice President, Peterson was forced out of the company and set out to…
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The Statistics of Wikipedia’s Fundraising Campaign
Yesterday, 15th January 2011, Wikipedia celebrated its tenth birthday. Just over two weeks before, Wikipedia was also celebrating the close of its 2010 fundraising campaign where over sixteen million dollars was raised from over half a million donors in just fifty days. The 2010 campaign was billed as being data-driven, with the Wikipedia volunteers “testing…
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Preventable Startup Mistakes (That Caused the Downfall of Seven Startups)
Verifiable, Wesabe, Storytlr, TwitApps, Vox, Swivel and EventVue: All companies or products that no longer exist after preventable problems caused their downfall. 37signals collects their stories so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes, presenting a set of brief post-mortems on failed startups. The recurring issues seem to be: solving problems that the world isn’t…
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Software Project Metrics and Control: They Don’t Matter (Sometimes)
Software project metrics are not as important as we have been led to believe, and the field of software engineering has evolved to such a state as to almost be almostā¦ over. This is according to the eminent software engineer Tom DeMarco who, looking back at his 1986 book on the subject, Controlling Software Projects:…
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Using Charity to Increase Voluntary Payments
If a business is experimenting with voluntary pricing (‘pay-what-you-want’ pricing), to increase sales and profits give a portion of voluntary payments away to charity (and advertise the fact, naturally). That’s the conclusion from a study by researcher Ayelet Gneezy comparing a number of pricing plans involving–in various combinations–voluntary payments, fixed prices and charitable donations: At…