selling

Fiat has utterly botched the intro of its quirky but very drivable 500 -- sales are under 50% of plan -- and it's about to fire people and hold a huge group-grope agency review to  come up with a new strategy. I have a simpler solution, which I hereby offer up for free: copy VW's Beetle and BMW’s Mini Cooper American launches.

Book Review: Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy by Martin Lindstrom

Like a surgeon exposing the nasty underbelly of medical malpractice, Martin Lindstrom, branding expert and author of the neuromarketing book Buyology, takes a decidedly consumerist point of view in showing how brands influence and sometimes even control our lives.

Does your brand or business have an emotional connection with at least some of its customers? If so, that’s a very good thing. A new study of retail chains showed that while just one in five consumers felt they had an emotional connection to a retailer, those that did were far more valuable as customers and as brand evangelists.

Want to close a sale? When choosing a time to meet with your customer, don’t just take the first appointment time offered to you. A recent study looked at decisions by judges, and revealed startling differences in outcomes at different times of day. Researchers at Columbia University and Ben Gurion University examined the decisions made by judges reviewing parole requests and plotted the rulings by time of day:

Compete recently published a blog post called Four Things You Might Not Know About Twitter. Based on its consumer data, Compete concluded that:

We think of brands as amazingly powerful. People prefer whatever cola they are drinking, as long as it’s labeled Coca Cola. People pay lots more for a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt than a generic shirt of identical quality. And while the brand rarely changes, slogans are treated as ephemeral and tend to be changed much more frequently. But, to resurrect an old Coke motto, what if a brand’s slogan was the REAL thing?

In years of running a direct marketing firm that included a small call center, my objective was to eliminate, or at least minimize, waiting time for phone customers. We knew (from those times when we didn’t have enough staff in place) that the longer callers waited to speak to a representative, the higher the probability was that they would abandon the call.

Guest Post by: Katie Byrnes

To effectively build relationships with prospects, sales teams need to learn to leverage evolving sales strategies. Without utilizing social networking, content marketing and other strategies, sales teams are likely leaving money on the table.

Late-night infomercials and commercials often promote subjects like buying real-estate with no money down and other get-rich quick schemes. While these promotions are broadcast in the wee hours because air time is cheaper and more readily available, it turns out there’s solid science behind this timing. In a new study, Duke university researchers found significant differences in the way sleep-deprived subjects evaluated risk: