You know this as a buyer. When you plan to buy a B2B service, you go to that brand’s website. You read the homepage. You try to understand what they do, how they do it, and how they are different. And based on what you see, you form an opinion and make a decision: to take the next step with that brand or not. Well, your potential buyers do the same too. That’s why your home page is important. It’s not a conversion-first channel like a landing page. But it’s more of an introduction and...
14 days ago • 3 min read
You know about this. Marketing tactics fall into two categories: push and pull. “Push” tactics are interruptions. They interrupt a potential buyer and ask for an action. Meanwhile, “pull” tactics are the opposite. You make buyers come to you by offering them content they might be interested in. There is an inherent problem with push tactics. Effective push tactics get overused. And as they are interruptions, people become immune to them. One example is banner ads on websites. In 1994, AT&T...
22 days ago • 4 min read
Think about it. How come some brands have passionate believers like political parties? People even do irrational stuff for some brands. Like getting into a line at 5 a.m. to buy products or defending it against negative comments online as if somebody cursed their mother. It’s almost like some brands become part of customers’ identities. But how does that happen? What causes a brand to turn from just a random business into a part of buyers’ identity? Well, one answer to this question is...
30 days ago • 5 min read
What brands come to your mind when you hear "accounting firms"? You can probably list 3-4 brands. First, you’d think about Deloitte. Then you’d continue with the other ones you know, like PwC, Ernst & Young, your own accountant, etc. The same applies if I tell you “toothpaste” or “energy drink.” Buyers remember a shortlist of brands in every category. Jack Trout and Al Ries called it category ladders. If the category is a high-interest one or has a high purchase frequency, the ladder gets...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
There are key differences between B2B product (e.g. software) vs. B2B service (e.g. consultancy) businesses: In a product business, the product comes before everything. In a service business, human capital comes first. Product businesses tend to be transactional. Service businesses tend to be relational. In a product business, customers care about features, design, and social signaling before anything else. In a service business, they care about expertise, trust, and results first. In a...
2 months ago • 1 min read
In 1996, two Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin realized the largest internet search engines were doing it wrong. Yahoo and MSN manually curated sites like a directory. So you could only search for certain things. AltaVista had a slightly more advanced algorithm. It ranked sites depending on how many times your search term appeared on a site. But if the word “carrot” appears on a page 20 times, that doesn’t mean that’s the page you are looking for. So they didn’t have good...
3 months ago • 6 min read
We’ve talked about the 3C’s that drive a brand’s positioning in our Profit-Led Branding Framework: Company, Competition, and Customer. In this article, we’ll look into the last C: Customer. There are actually two parts of Customer Analysis. We’ll cover the “What are our customers trying to achieve?” part here. The second part “Who are the customers trying to make that progress?” is for another day. Now let’s see why Slack was about to fail as a “group chat app”, how positioning increases...
3 months ago • 8 min read
In 2007, two MIT students —Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi— created a solution to a modern problem. Laptops and smartphones were becoming more common. And they realized people needed a simple way to access their files from different devices. So they developed an app that allowed users to store their files in the “cloud.” They called it Dropbox. They validated the idea with a demo video in the tech community and got investment. But when they launched it to the public, they realized an issue....
3 months ago • 6 min read
It’s Friday night. You finally have a chance to relax on your sofa after a long week. You decide to watch a movie with your partner. So you get some snacks and open Netflix to choose a movie to watch. You have a quick look at Netflix’s suggestions. Nothing interesting. So you scroll to the next category. There is one movie that catches your attention. But you remember your partner doesn’t like that genre. So you scroll again. One category after the other… You click a few of them to read their...
3 months ago • 5 min read
