Consulting firms rank brands on value. Marketers promise to increase it. But brand value has little to do with whether a company is famous or even profitable. The accurate measure of brand value is the premium that consumers will spend over the generic. What time, money or risk will they take for a valuable brand […]

The simplest way forward is to see which boxes your target market has and then check all of them. Unfortunately #1: The audience doesn’t publish their actual list of boxes, they conceal many of them. Unfortunately #2: They don’t all have the same boxes. Unfortunately #3: If it were that straightforward, your competition would have […]

Twenty handwritten letters received by someone in power are worth a hundred times as much as two letters. And when that becomes a hundred different personal letters, increasing in volume, from different people, delivered to an organization every week for a year… it’s worth a million times as many as just twenty.

“I don’t want to learn to be better,” is something we rarely admit. We don’t say: I don’t want to learn statistics, even though it will dramatically improve my decision making. I don’t want to learn a new programming language, even though it will get me a better job. I don’t want to learn methods […]