100 Great Marketing Ideas

From leading companies around the world

Jim Blythe

Publisher: Marshall Cavendish, 2009 , 200 pages

ISBN: 978-0-462-09942-2

Synopsis:

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Marketing moves fast — competitors come up with new ideas to steal your business every day, so you need to stay ahead of the game. This book can help! Written in an engaging and lively manner, it gives you 100 ideas from real companies, ideas that have been tried and tested. The Ideas are thought-provoking and adaptable to most businesses — some are no-brainers (which, nevertheless, are under-used), while others are subtle and surprising.

Whether you are running a small business of your own, working in marketing for a big company, or advising others, this book will be an invaluable addition to your briefcase.

Table of Contents:

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1. Give the product away
2. Make it fun
3. Get decision-makers together
4. Tease your customers
5. The "real money" mailing
6. Withdraw the product
7. Find the key account
8. Add some value
9. Do something different
10. Respect your consumer
11. Play a game
12. Bring a friend
13. Use promotional gifts that really promote
14. Do not bind the mouths of the kine
15. Empowering staff
16. Speak the customer’s language
17. Build your corporate culture
18. Have a startling brand
19. Make the product easy to demonstrate
20. Throw a party
21. Follow up on customers later
22. Lost customers are not always lost
23. Bait the hook
24. Hold on to those brochures
25. Show people the competition
26. Take your partners
27. Making exhibitions work
28. Set the price, even on things you are giving away
29. Let them shout!
30. Turn a disadvantage to an advantage
31. Develop an icon
32. Educate your customers
33. Tap into country-of-origin effect
34. Charge what the service is worth
35. Be consistent
36. Love your customers, love what they love
37. Make it easy for people to pay
38. Credit where credit’s due
39. Don’t compete
40. Keep them waiting
41. Form a club
42. Get the layout right
43. Avoid annoying the customers
44. Work with the negative aspects of your product
45. Put yourself on a networking site
46. Discourage the undesirables
47. Watch how people actually use your products
48. Form a panel
49. Get somebody else to pay for what you give your customers for free
50. Make people behave
51. Give people something that helps you to communicate your brand to them
52. Help your allies to help you
53. Keep your eggs in one basket
54. Whet the customer’s appetite
55. Be startling in ways that involve your customer
56. If you’re on the web, you’re global
57. Look beyond the obvious
58. Find the USP
59. Reposition into a better market
60. Use the packaging
61. Influence the influencers
62. Research your customers
63. Involve your customers
64. Integrate your database
65. Tap into the social network
66. Flog it on eBay
67. Communicate in a relevant way
68. Develop your brand personality by linking it to a real personality
69. Know your customer’s motivations
70. Identify your competitors—and learn from them
71. Pick the segments nobody else wants
72. Pick a card
73. Trust your customers to handle their own complaints
74. Find the lost tribe
75. Find the right partners
76. Tailor your products
77. Integrate communications
78. Share the wealth
79. Think small
80. Be the expert
81. Ads on cars
82. Go to the source of customers
83. Make your customers laugh
84. Focus on the key issue for your customer
85. Vary the ambience
86. Grab them early
87. Be child-friendly
88. Understand how you are judged
89. Introduce a third alternative
90. Place your product
91. Specialize to charge a premium
92. Develop a separate brand for each market
93. Use opinion leaders
94. Link to a cause
95. Set a sprat to catch a mackerel
96. Consider the culture
97. Build a new distribution channel
98. Use a weblog
99. Make buying easy
100. Make your product easier to use than everybody else’s