“Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing is arguably the most powerful way to market your product or services. When customers talk favorably of your product or service, they send a free, credible and targeted marketing message. And when word spreads, it usually spreads fast. No other marketing tactic provides such benefits in one package.”

“Learning which companies are highly regarded by business students can help job hunters and recruiters spot untapped market opportunities. Plus, vote for the most admired businessperson.”

“Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing is arguably the most powerful way to market your product or services. When customers talk favorably of your product or service, they send a free, credible and targeted marketing message. And when word spreads, it usually spreads fast. No other marketing tactic provides such benefits in one package.”

The Researcher SourceBook contains listings of more than 7,300 firms providing marketing research products and services.

“Enormous amounts of time are being spent with no real focus. There are many partners who randomly attend functions and networking lunches, serve on committees and boards and give seminars and speeches. How many can talk about the specific goals for each of these activities? Of firms with formalized marketing programs, a rare few are successfully tracking the results of these efforts.” (Requires free registration.)

The Researcher SourceBook contains listings of more than 7,300 firms providing marketing research products and services.

“Few businesses, large or small, are untouched by the change of outlook over the past few weeks. Many feel a new vulnerability, a new aversion to risk and a new awareness of the fragility of a just-in-time economy. Everywhere, managers are wondering how to adjust not only to the immediate uncertainty but also to a much darker future.”

“It seems to be a no brainer that products are designed to fulfill consumer needs. It seems equally obvious that advertising and other marketing communications are supposed to relate a product to consumers’ underlying needs and values. The real problem seems to be finding out what consumers want and why they want it.”

“Michael Johnson, business professor at the University of Michigan, demystifies CRM.”

” Managing Editor of MarketingSherpa.com.

“Buy-In is one such state of being, in which a person takes on an idea as his/her own and gets into action on it. Buy-In is the foundation of all project work. It clearly has survival advantages in getting large things done. Note that we are the only great ape that does projects and that dolphins and whales also show no such activity. Buy-In can now be described in detail and the exact steps required to create it laid out. Buy-In depends on both the use of modules for language and visual imaging, and the two must both be used in a precise way. To give a speech designed to create Buy-In you can follow these steps…” (Direct link to the .pdf: Buy-In and Flow…)

“I like to think of projects as a journey from the abstract to the concrete. Here’s a simple path: Do business strategy / user research

“Don Norman schedules, profits and loss, sales, and margins. We need to understand why products sell, who buys them, what the distribution channels are. In other words, we need to learn the language of business, of finance, and of marketing. We have to put the system first, not our special skills.”

“Book review: For Hammer, author of Reengineering the Corporation, one of the most influential business books of the 90s, The Agenda is a set of nine issues that the best companies are already adopting and the rest must learn to adopt. These nine items are ‘changes that companies of all kinds and sizes must put in place if they want to operate successfully in the face of the escalating demands of the customer economy.’”

“Determining the ROI on a newsletter program is not as straightforward as it is for a standard direct mail or direct email campaign. For most direct marketing campaigns, determining the ROI requires simply calculating the direct sales and costs for the campaign. With newsletters, direct sales are usually not the primary focus of the campaign, so the standard calculation neglects the principal objectives of the program.” (Requires free registration.)