HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY
“All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my Mother.”—Abe Lincoln
What they buy teaches you how to sell
WEDNESDAY’S WEEKLY READER
Food for thought gathered from around the web and served fresh to you.
Buying our way through 100 years
How much have people changed in the past 100 years? Not as much as their spending habits. Visual Economics’ 100 year graph tracks shifts in buying patterns. See what we value more today than we did a century ago. Specifically, see how much more we spend on transportation now as contrasted against a century earlier.
Tale of the Christmas register tape
The spend this Christmas told a story of value-centric consumers. See updated sales performance numbers for leading retailers across the country as gathered by The Wall Street Journal. The winners made their case on value. Those who didn’t lost big. Consumers made a choice for quality and set frivolous purchases aside. Zogby concurs, reporting Americans expect to make less in 2009 which will only intensify the importance an authentic value proposition in your advertising. Roy H. Williams predicted this buying behavior back on December 8, 2009. How are you making a value case in your advertising?
The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever hoid
Those who curse the changing market would be wise to seek the tutelage of Groucho Marks. How do you crack the code and get your business on top? Seth Godin sums it up: when the market changes, change with it or get left behind.
Hating Wal-Mart won’t hurt them, but it could kill you
That old man at the front door who greets you. The clerk who leads you to the product you can’t find. The person who answers the phone and cares enough to make sure you get an answer you can use. My partner Tim Miles points out how customer service, once the domain of the little guy, is being appropriated to make a big impression by the big guys. Beating them at that game isn’t a simple matter of out-nicing them. Get the details here.
How big do you want your toys?
Saving your sanity sometimes means getting away and doing the unexpected. Like, say, playing with real-life Tonka trucks–the kind used to build roads and buildings. Dig, in Steamboat Springs Colorado, allows you to play out your big truck fantasies.
Here’s even better news: they do birthday parties too. Sounds like a road trip!
Bullies, bites, and buggy whips
WEDNESDAY’S WEEKLY READER
New to adMISSIONs: a weekly sampler of tasty news morsels caught in my net as I troll the web, delivered fresh to you:
95% of customers: a waste of money
4-5% of customers account for most of your business? That’s what Daisy Whitney says in OMMA magazine. “It’s not what is most efficient, it’s what is most effective. It’s not how big your share of voice is, it’s how important your customers think you are.” Roy H. Williams developed a formula for quantifying effectiveness in his bestselling Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads
SEO is killing the web
That’s the upshot of this article by John Dvorak. Rampant SEO strategies, he says, ruins the search experience for users, requiring the search engine folks to constantly work on countermeasures to minimize the impact of SEO techniques.
TV Everywhere bullies you into buying it all
Cable is like a buggy-whip giant in the early days of the car biz: Comcast’s TV Everywhere product offers shows airing on cable and over-the-air TV networks. The catch: you must subscribe to both Comcast and its Internet service. To get what you want, you gotta buy what you won’t use.
You thought we were done with Top 10′s?
Springwise has gathered what they think are the Top Ten business ideas for 2010. Take it from the source: they’re based in Amsterdam. I’m still waiting for wooden shoes to take off.
Watch your mouth: words to avoid in 2010
Word “czars” at Lake Superior State University “unfriended” 15 words and phrases and declared them “shovel-ready” for inclusion on the university’s 35th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.
Cool app: Visual Thesaurus
A graphical thesaurus displaying unexpected word connections. Great brainstorming tool. Confession: I’m a word geek and love their Word of the Day. While most of the words fly the face of the “use common words uncommonly” rule, stories behind words expose new ideas. If only they had an iPhone app.
Only one thing worse than a foot in your mouth
Sporting over 145 million views, this is the most viewed clip of all time on YouTube. So simple, yet strangely compelling. Consider that next time you’re cooking up an online video: keep it simple and authentic. Unless you want to sound like this guy.
Your smarts shows in how you use a day
No two people spend a day the same way. It turns out, however, that there are striking similarities in how people in various lifestyles use theirs.
The New York Times recently published an interactive graph displaying data from the American Time Use Survey. Some of the patterns may seem obvious, but it’s striking to see the difference education makes on working hours, time spent in leisure, eating and activities such as housework.
The annual survey asks thousands of people to recall every minute of every day. Their accounts, displayed on an hourly basis in the chart, are food for thought when crafting personas or seeking an understanding of your customers’ lifestyles. It’s helpful, as Futurethink says, to consider “they spend their time and what, on average, they’re doing at a particular time during the day.”