CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

Marketing is commonly seen in two ways.   Both are highly damaging to any business.   Radical statement?   Well, let’s take a look at the two ways:   1. Most business people see marketing as an activity in which the products or services of the business are pumped out into the marketplace in the hope of attracting customers. To do this, businesses run ad campaigns, social media campaigns, have billboards, work on branding and basically try every way they can think of of gettin

If you’ve been following along each part of this course so far, you will have learned a number of almost magical things:   1. You now know that there are five basic mechanisms at work in any good business, attracting potential customers, compelling those potential customers forward, sticking prospects to your business, involving and engaging them by asking them to make moral choices, until they are captivated completely by your main message and driven forward to the conclusio

Most businesses feature a classic prospect and following a classic pattern, much of which we covered earlier when discussing prospects.   It’s worth noting what this basic pattern is, so that we can then go on to discuss slight variations of it. So what exactly happens to bring about a successful transition from prospect to happy and fulfilled customer?   In the beginning, you just have traffic. In that volume of traffic, you have people who, because of their basic needs, are

Traditional marketing says that you have a product or service and that you have to try to get that product or service into the possession or use of as many people as possible, so that you can make as much money as possible. So you have to go out into the world and put up billboards, and place ads in newspapers and on Facebook, and appear in videos on YouTube, and get interviewed on radio and television, all with the aim of contacting, persuading, and conquering the resistive

We saw in the last article that the things that we have become accustomed to calling 'customers' are actually almost vacuums disguised as people. A prospect is someone with a vacuum (a need, a desire, a gap, something missing); a customer is someone who has decided that you can fill that vacuum, enough to have made a monetary commitment to you - they buy something. You don’t need to ‘develop a product’ to make it convincing or attractive - you need to develop your understandi

So far in this little course we have learned about a range of things including what a customer really is and how he or she is attracted to a product or service. ‘Conversion’, we have learned, is about transforming one type of prospect into another, the type that becomes a customer. And we have learned that all of this has much to do with something that we have termed a ‘vacuum’.   Please remember that whenever we use the word 'vacuum' we are talking about need . The point of

You will have read a lot about ‘conversion’. Conversion is normally seen as the change from viewer or reader or prospect to customer - that is, the process by which a person becomes committed to you and what you have to offer. It’s worth noting exactly how this process works, as well as why you should place just the right amount of attention on it, neither too little nor too much.   In the same way that a reader is pulled along by a story, so is a prospect almost physically p

In the second part of this series, we saw that it was possible to devise something called a ‘customer template’ - in effect, a model customer or the ideal sort of person who would be completely fulfilled by your product or service.   If you describe a customer in terms of vulnerabilities, losses, threats, weaknesses from which they are suffering, perhaps someone who has had previous ideas crushed or made fun of, leaving a feeling of weakness and hopelessness, an interesting t