Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs? Biological needs. Safety and shelter needs. The need to belong and to feel loved. Self-esteem and the need to feel good about oneself in relation to others. These are basic human needs. Every human being has them. Every customer is constantly...

The hero starts out in an ordinary world before venturing into a special world. He meets friend and foe. He undertakes quests. He faces challenges. Winning a decisive victory—realizing his final goal—the hero returns from the adventure, transformed, bearing wisdom and new powers from his journey. This hero’s...

Few business leaders appreciate exactly how important imagery is in connecting to the hearts of their customers. Most marketers want to create imagery that will attract everyone. That's impossible: when you try to be all things to all people, you become nothing meaningful to anyone. Imagery...

A positioning strategy is a way of positioning your retail products and services in the mind of your customers. As marketers, we aspire to build stronger positions—to create a place in the mind of our prospects and customers where our products are positively recalled.  We hope...

If you were to conduct an immediate survey right now, this very instant, of all of the leadership of all of the companies you interact with, in one form or another, over the course of any given 24 hour period, I can say, with a...

Fairy tales are some of the oldest stories in existence. In one form or another, these stories have been told time and time again—admittedly to entertain, but also to teach. The details vary from culture to culture—Europe gave us Hansel and Gretel using their wits to...

You can’t manage what you can’t measure.W. Edwards Deming Businesses have become obsessed with metrics. More metrics are treated as producing greater the results. And, the better the metrics, the better the results. This metric fixation is the byproduct of an unhealthy obsession with outcomes—the movement of...