“How do you use search to introduce the right buyers to the right sellers when it’s not a frequent transaction of a commodity?” The responsibility is the sellers! . We invented Persuasion Architecture to present the answers the buyer seeks. Chapters 19-21 of “Waiting For Your Cat to Bark” tell you how…

Planning Persuasion Scenarios is the core of Persuasion Architecture and it ensures that that seller will leave a relevant scent of information based on answering each buyer’s questions, addressing each…

...continue to read "Godin asks “Are You Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?”"

Advertising will always be with us. There will always be products, services, and circumstances that will warrant the use of advertising. Still, there can be no doubt that advertising as it is, as it was, must and WILL change dramatically.

It all compounds into one simple dynamic. Customers are ignoring marketing, and today’s advertiser is paying more for less return on their ad dollar. The old advertising template is broken, the carcasses of failed ad campaigns are piling up. The success…

...continue to read "The Advertising Death March?"

My thanks to Brian Massey of Hear This who was nice enough to organize a DiviCast  (slides plus audio) of my presentation at the Austin, TX American Marketing Association luncheon. Would you like to see the presentation?

...continue to read "Hear This! See This! Austin Presentation"

Mike Drew just called to let me know that "Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?" debuts on BusinessWeek’s monthly Hardcover Business Book list at #7. This list is monthly, as opposed to the others that are weekly, so we’ve been waiting.

Bryan, Lisa and I are so grateful to everyone who helped us with this book and to all of you wonderful people who bought and read it. You have read it already, right?

...continue to read "#7 BusinessWeek Bestseller"

Crackvertising  Pronounciation (krak-ver-tyzing) n. 1) The addiction to and/or business dependency on low cost traffic from Google search and other search advertising.

Signs of addiction include; needing more and more traffic to convert the same amount of sales, paying more and more for less and less traffic; and finally the advertiser’s life becomes obsessed with the next ‘fix’ of traffic. Lack of, reduction of, or fluctuation of paid  traffic results in severe withdrawal. The effect is usually a corresponding and…

...continue to read "Crackvertising – Are You Addicted?"

Your business can use transparency to its advantage, turning ordinary customers into tireless advocates for your brand

Do you ever get annoyed when a business’s online communications are as poor, if not worse, than their offline customer service? One of the most sacred promises of the Internet is that we have the power to chat with total strangers, regardless of how fragmented the information or disproportionately strong the opinion, to piece together the bigger picture about a given experience anytime, anywhere.…

...continue to read "The Transparency Imperative: Moving Beyond the Suggestion Box"

Implement strategies to improve your sales efficiency while meeting the needs of your customers

You’ve got online sales. You’ve got offline sales. To complicate matters, neither of these exists in isolation. According to a recent BIGresearch survey, 87% of the customers who research their purchases online actually buy offline!On top of that, websites and flesh-and-blood sales staff must continually field product and service questions from customers who increasingly are as, if not better, informed than they are!

How can you implement strategies…

...continue to read "In Sales? At Least 9 Things You Can Learn from Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?"

Jeff Jarvis strikes again. I know my brother Jeffrey blogged about him recently. And we reference him in connection to his "Dear Mr. Dell" post  in "Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?".

This time Jeff blogs about some terrifying statistics about the book market. Did you know that 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school? It gets worse than that. Only read his post if you want to spend the weekend depressed.

We know roughly how…

...continue to read "It’s Amazing Even Harry Potter Sells Any Books"

You step into a garden-variety department store.

Today, you’re purchasing a burgundy leather belt. You orient yourself; you scan for visual cues that may steer you in the right direction. Hanging from the ceiling in the far corner of the store is a sign that reads “Footwear.” You start in that direction.

Why?

Continue reading my column at ClickZ…

...continue to read "Three Steps to Creating Better Category Pages"

Brian Steinberg of the Wall Street Journal has this to say…

“Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?” will be most instructive to the advertising crowd, of course. It’s hard to find a book about marketing that is truly appropriate for anyone but people who practice the stuff. But general readers may find something valuable here too: the latest Madison Avenue methods for getting inside their brains and massaging their decision-making logic. If the Web offers marketers new opportunities, it also allows…

...continue to read "Buying and Selling in a Finicky World"