Intracting With Customers To Optimise Your Online Buisness:-

Get behind the wheel of any luxury car today, and you'll face a dashboard and console packed with buttons that run elaborate climate control, stereo and navigation systems. On paper all these options sound great—in practice, though, attempting to operate increasingly complicated electronics might leave many drivers frustrated and annoyed, yearning for the days of a few dials and a couple of knobs.

In a post at Harvard Business Online, Rita McGrath argues that one way to improve customer experience—and something few of us consider—is to take away something they find negative. She offers the example of a new PC packed with pre-installed software you don't want. "Getting rid of it is fiddly and time-consuming and exposes you to the risk of deleting something you really do need from your system," she says.

It has become such an issue, notes McGrath, that Best Buy has a prominent in-store display that offers to remove all the excess software for a fee. "[Y]ou get a nice, clean, machine which only has exactly what you wanted. No slow starts, no baffling come-ons for software you don't know you need (or do you?) and no confusing competition among three (or more) programs that do the same thing." A once-tolerable feature has become intolerable, and a retailer discovered there's money to be made in resolving a problem that originates with the supplier.

Your Marketing Inspiration: "I always encourage companies to think about whether the new things they are adding to their offers really benefit the customer or not," says McGrath. "If not, it runs the risk of being a tolerated, disliked, or ultimately hated feature that can put your company at a competitive disadvantage."

Reaching a niche audience—and only those people—can be tricky. But in a post at his eponymous blog, Seth Godin proposes the inventive approach of piggybacking onto a product that your target market already wants.

Say you have a rock band with a quirky sound, and people who like your music also like The B-52's. Riffing on an idea from Kpao!'s Dave Cortwright, Godin suggests buying a bunch of CDs by the Athens, Georgia, band, and listing them on eBay.

"Price them ridiculously low, like a dollar," says Godin. "The only people who are going to buy a copy are focused fans. Then, when you ship out the CD, include your new CD in the box as well. You've reached exactly the right people (purchasers! who spent money! who are fans!) at exactly the right moment."

He points out that such a strategy doesn't have to include eBay. If your massage service, for instance, complements a fitness service offered by a personal trainer in your neighborhood, you could give her a dozen introductory gift certificates for her best customers.

The Po!nt: Get creative in the way you market to people who buy similar products or services. According to Godin, your hypothetical rock band could spend $10,000 on advertisements, or you could place samples of your product in the hands of 1,000 "perfect" fans. "Thinking small," he says. "It tends to work."

You spend most of your day trying to be creative, but do you ever stop to ask yourself what creativity is? With a white board, a few markers and a techno soundtrack, Tate Linden uses the written word to express and modify his thoughts on the subject. And because it's shown in fast-forward—the video checks in at under one minute—viewers get a sense of his mental process in real time.

After posting the question, "What Is Creativity?" at the top of the board, Linden gives his first answer:

* It is the drive to do things differently.

He changes the statement to read:

* It is the freedom to do things differently.

Then he runs through a series of serious and half-serious suggestions:

* It is the freedom to embrace your ADD, to change your mind, to be meaningless, to be meaningful.

And finally, he arrives at a conclusion:

* It is freedom.

Linden concedes that the video's production values are imperfect. "But that's what I get for doing a spur of the moment unscripted piece," he notes, with the qualification, "How better to show what creativity is than to attempt to show it on the fly?"

Asking the question—and attempting to provide an honest answer—puts you in the right frame of mind for reaching your full creative potential. And that's Marketing Inspiration.

SOURCE--MARKETING PROS

Released on----- 24 October, 2009