At the risk of dating myself, have you heard the late 70s song Video Killed the Radio Star? I am reminded of it every time I hear proclamations of how the internet or social media has irrevocably changed marketing and sales. “Do you create video datasheets?” a prospective customer asked me in a recent...
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Businesses offering professional services often end up chasing accounts that are unlikely to yield results. They end up spending cycles only to see their efforts wasted. Adopting a simple model based on the maturity of the organization and their desire for outsourcing some of their processes helps focus efforts on the right accounts.
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At Zebu, we’ve had the fortune of working on both sides of the Public Relations dance exercise. As clients, mostly in technology firms, we’ve had engaged multiple PR firms in India and overseas, with varying results and vastly different experiences. We’ve also more recently played the supplier role – as providers of public relations...
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“Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing”, according to a financial wizard we know as Warren Buffet. What Warren Buffet may not realize is that his words hold equally true for a large number of businesses and indeed, marketers. Ask a marketer “Who is your customer?” and...
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At Zebu, we work with a number of customers who are still in a startup phase. A great deal of our ex-colleagues have startups of their own, to which we have ringside seats. While we’d have argued that the economic downturn was a good time to start a business, for these startups, like most...
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Marketing battles are fought in the minds of the customer and not rooted in the realities of the product, according to marketing gurus, Al Ries and Jack Trout. In most industries, the market leader is invariably one that customers instantly associate with a single or simplified concept such as Volvo = safety; Heinz =...
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