Archive for January 2011

The Opportunity in Online Trends

Friday, January 28th, 2011
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I’m currently in the middle of reading Chris Anderson’s book “The Long Tail”, which speaks of the endless opportunities the internet is providing online retailers to cater to niche markets, and the resulting increases in sales that are possible. Within the book, there is a particular example that stood out to me.

Anderson speaks of the example of two mountain-climbing books, one released in the 80’s and one just a few years ago. Although it did not originally see large sales, the book from the 80’s suddenly exploded following the successful release of the newer book. How could this have happened?

Do you use your expert suppliers?

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011
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When you engage a supplier to do work for you, generally you are engaging them because they have expertise that you do not have and it is less expensive to utilize their services than hire internally.  But how many times do you waste your time trying to do work that could be handled by your expert suppliers.  I look at our business, we are very knowledgeable about online marketing and we have the ability to consult with all our customers on various marketing and online marketing decisions.

Is your office space too nice?

Thursday, January 13th, 2011
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I was talking to a company this week that specializes in putting together one year marketing strategy action plans for customers.  We were talking about going to visit him in Regina Saskatchewan and he said just to let you know we do not have an office all our employees work out of their homes.  I thought interesting, my first thought was how does this look from a customers point of view that they work out of their houses as it looks like you are not established etc.  He quickly clarified that they use this fact to sell themselves more to customers as all his employees had worked for advertising companies with lavish office spaces and he felt that the client is paying for that space.