Tag: marketing
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Persuasive Infomercial Sales Techniques
I don’t take infomercials very seriously, mainly due to how hilarious and absurd they are. However I’ve now been won over and can see their potential for certain product–market combinations. How did this miraculous change come about? Through a surprisingly enjoyable interview between Andrew Warner and the master of the infomercial, Tim Hawthorne. From his…
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Marketing Lessons for Startups
When Ilya Lichtenstein offered free marketing advice to startups (as a way of thanking the Hacker News community) he received over 150 requests and set to work. Certain patterns started to emerge in his advice, and so he decided to produced a three-post ‘startup marketing lessons learnt’ series (parts two and three). There’s some fantastic…
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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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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: the ‘superpremium’ vodka that Barcardi bought for $2…
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Market Segmentation and the PRIZM NE System
Market segmentation is a method of grouping people with similar characteristics, primarily for marketing purposes. A number of years ago, USA Today described in detail the information large consumer segmentation businesses track and use to group us. It’s an eye-opening read: The [consumer segmentation businesses] are pinpointing who lives where; what they’re most likely to…
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A/B Testing Case Studies
Paras Chopra, founder of the fairly self-explanatory A/B testing company Visual Website Optimizer, provides an introduction to A/B testing that is as useful for newcomers as it is old-timers. In the article, Chopra provides a few dos and don’ts, an overview of some A/B testing tools, a fantastic list of resources and a collection of…
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Privacy and Tracking with Digital Coupons
Data collection and mining can be quite lucrative pursuits for many retailers, and technological advances are providing them with more novel and extensive methods of doing just that. Data mining is a topic I’ve been fascinated with ever since I was introduced to it in university, and this look at how digital coupons track us…
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Web Marketing Lessons from Cialdini’s ‘Influence’
No marketer should be engaging with people online without having read Robert Cialdini’s much lauded Influence, says SEOmoz co-founder Rand Fishkin. To this end, Rand presents his Illustrated Guide to the Science of Influence and Persuasion. The six main principles illustrated: Reciprocation: “The power of reciprocation relies on several conventions. The request must be “in-kind,”…
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Vowel Sounds and Price Perceptions
How the vowels in words are pronounced has an influence on how we perceive the size of an item. This ‘phonetic symbolism’ has also been shown to effect how we perceive prices: Researchers have known for 80 years about a symbolic connection between speech and size: back-of-the-mouth vowels like the “o” in “two” make people…
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Text-Only Ads are the Most Effective
Advertisers are “often wrong about what attracts our attention” is the conclusion of a usability study looking at how users interact with online advertising. The study, published in the report Eyetracking Web Usability by the Nielsen Norman Group (a usability consultancy firm from Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice), suggests that text-only advertising is the most…