MARKETING

The most important qualities in a marketing executive are: patience, imagination, ego-strength, and aggressiveness. - Jay Conrad Levinson

Offer customers a guarantee on an aspect of the business that is routinely performed. - Customer Service in Action

Real stamps instead of metered inkblots raise the response rate of mailing to consumers at home. - Shell Alpert

A minimally qualified lead for an enterprise software company will cost you between $90 - $150. -Rahul Roy-Chowdhury

On average it costs 5 times as much to get a new customer as it does to retain an existing customer. - Customer Research Consultants

Highly satisfied customers will tell 5 to 6 of their friends about your business. On average, dissatisfied customers will tell 12.5 people about your business, and only 5% of dissatisfied customers will bother complaining to management; so for each complaint to management you may have already lost 250 potential customers. (Of course these statistics were measured before the internet). - Various studies and sources - S Milford

The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. - Peter Drucker

Segment customers, not markets. Other than value, segment only by needs: forget demographics, behaviours, attitudes, lifestyles - they are only proxies for needs (of course you analyse the proxies, but segment by needs because value is only created in satisfying needs). - Vladimir Dimitroff

When not sure if something is a true need or a mere proxy, ask the '3 question test'. A true need should complete a sentence starting with 'Give me -', 'Save me -' or 'Help me to -' You can easily fit health, financial security, time, hassle or 'to stay in touch with friends and family' into such sentences, but 'baby boomers' cannot be a segment. - Vladimir Dimitroff