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Tag: trust

  • The Power of a Question

    The Power of a Question

    Mitch Vandiver (at mitch@strategiescorp.net.) and The Strategies, Inc. Team put this together, and I thought it was perfect for my readers – it’s all about asking the right questions . . .

    Michael J. Marquardt, author of Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask says, “You don’t have to have the answer to ask a great question. A great question will ultimately get an answer.”

    A school teacher shared this story. One day, as the children played at recess, a usually very calm, good-natured little boy hit a little girl, who was his best friend. The playground monitors rushed over as the little girl stood crying. One monitor immediately reprimanded the boy in an angry voice, “You can’t hit other people. That’s wrong! What were you thinking?! And, boys don’t hit girls!”

    Now, both children stood sobbing. The other playground monitor sat down with the children and asked only one question of the little boy, “Why did you hit her?” Through tears, he explained, “There was a bee on her and I didn’t want my friend to get stung.” The monitor glanced down and, indeed, laying on the ground by the little girl, was a bee.

    What a difference a great question can make! This true story is a brilliant metaphor for the times we should have asked more questions and didn’t.

    Effective and empowering questions serve several proposes:

    1. They create clarity – What did you learn about the little boy through one question?

    2. They construct better relationships – How did your opinion of the little boy shift when you understood his reason?

    3. They inspire people to reflect and see things in fresh, unpredictable ways and encourage breakthrough thinking – What would you ask the little boy to help him find other solutions to protecting his friend from bees?

    4. They challenge assumptions – What assumptions did the first playground monitor make? How did those change with one question?

    Open-ended questions do not seek specific answers. They allow curiosity and exploration. Good opened-ended questions can start with what, how, when, where, who, tell me, or I wonder.

    Great questions benefit organizations, teams, and employees by minimizing miscommunication from making assumptions, changing points of view, stimulating creativity, engaging critical thinking, developing ownership of issues, and encouraging problem solving ability.

    What great questions will you ask of others today?

  • Guest blogger Adam Schectman of Eye Catching Creative on Branding

    Guest blogger Adam Schectman of Eye Catching Creative on Branding

    Branding is one of our mainstay services – it touches and influences every engagement we have to one degree or another. We focus on it so you don’t have to. I caught this article by fellow SMEI veteran Adam Schechtman, and though rather than restate it, I’d simply repost it and give him the credit he so richly deserves! Way to go Adam, nice take on one of our favorite subjects.

    Guest Blogger: Adam Schechtman, VP of Business Development  and Marketing, Eye Catching Creative

    To brand or not to brand? That is the question so many small and mid-sized businesses tend to overlook in the early phases of their development. The problem is there’s a tendency to keep shuffling this linchpin of marketing success to the dark corners of the priority list. Then one day, we read an article or hear someone talking about a competitor and cringe in uneasiness because they did something we didn’t…built a solid brand.

    Like marketing in general, branding is easy to lose focus on, especially when we have experienced some degree of success. If you agree that today’s markets have changed and the way businesses DO business has changed, then it’s time to recalibrate some of your own marketing efforts. That means its back to basics! Like the “butterfly effect,” small improvements in your branding strategy can have a tremendous impact on growth over time.

    We know from marketing 101 that your brand is your identity. Beyond the visual or physical makeup… name, logo, advertising, a brand is quite simply the psychological impact you have on customers. Branding is so important because people buy emotionally and then logic steps in to support their buying decision. Your brand is essentially a part of the ongoing relationship you have with customers. It is a compilation of messages that differentiate (or don’t differentiate) your business, product or service from everyone else who plays in the same space as you do. Take a second look at the competition of today. If someone stands out, why do they stand out? Who doesn’t stand out? Which category does your company fall into and who might be able to help you to improve on that position?

    From your email address to your website, to how the phone is answered to the relevance of your marketing materials, your brand must be professional, consistent and CURRENT. What the company stands for and what you’re offering should be different and clear. When is the last time you really dissected how you are perceived in the market and what your market position truly is? One easy way is to run a survey using existing customers or even some customers that you lost. Resources like SurveyMonkey.com are fantastic, free, e-survey questionnaire tools that are easy to use and easy on the budget. So let me ask you… what perception do your customers have of your business? What does your presence in the market “feel” like to customers and professional peers (aka competitors) and more importantly… are you being felt?

    Adam Schechtman is an entrepreneur and co-owner of Eye Catching Creative, providing virtual, on-call design, advertising and marketing solutions to budget-conscious small and mid-sized businesses. With more than 15 years in marketing, business development and sales, he is also the former owner of Achieve Senior Home Care and former co-owner/franchiser of Advance Realty Solutions. Adam holds an MBA in marketing from Johns Hopkins University. Visit www.eyecatchingcreative.com for more information.

    Get the feel right the first time – we can help you with your branding research to give you the insights to get it right the first time! If you liked this, be sure to subscribe to this blog above.

  • When It Comes To Ads, Trust . . . But Verify

    When It Comes To Ads, Trust . . . But Verify

    One of a marketer’s biggest challenges is creating trust with a new audience. If a sector of your potential customer base has never heard of you, or you’re breaking into a new market in which you have no previous exposure or installed base, you need to create trust with that new audience immediately.

    Unfortunately, some more unscrupulous marketers using techniques that one could call questionably ethical at best, have raised the trust bar for consumers, making our job more difficult. The days when you could say practically anything on TV or radio or in print, and as long as you said it often enough, people would come to believe it, are long gone. The buying public has many more sources of information available to them, and many more ways to verify the information you’re presenting, including speedier access to friends and advisers, websites with reviews, and more.

    That makes it more difficult to present information in anything but an accurate light. It also means that if you do succeed in bamboozling the public with less than honest information or product claims, that fact, once revealed, will travel faster than ever before, and word will spread at a phenomenal rate about the deceptive practices.

    This means that as marketers we have to dig deeper into the creativity well, work harder at crafting that real offer, work smarter at getting people’s attention, draw down on more ways to present different benefits in an appealing way to a more wary consumer. It’s not enough to just say it’s “better”, you have to explain why . . .

    For successful marketers, that means a high level of speed and adaptability, a higher level of selectivity in media choices, and a better understanding of the chosen audience, both psychologically and transactionally. And, now more than ever, reputation is your most valuable asset.

    Advertisers go to great lengths to make their offers sound as appealing as possible, to show their products in their most flattering light – and sometimes they go too far. If you hear a claim regarding a product or company that sounds too good to be true, it’s still a good bet that it shouldn’t be trusted. As our once-fearless leader Ronald Reagan noted, when dealing with the unknown, “Trust . . . but verify”!

    If you found this informational or inspirational, subscribe to this blog and receive more in your inbox weekly. Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”