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The Gurus

10. The Tipping Point for Small Business

Previous blogs have explored some of Malcolm Gladwell’s ideas. What can a small business learn from Gladwell?   Focus on identifying the Connectors (the people who know everyone and are pro-active referrers), the Mavens (the experts, the people who are used as the reference point by others in any particular context) and Salesmen (the convincers) […]

9. What’s going on around you?

The Power of Context is the third of Gladwells three key factors. He illustrates this by a ‘Good Samaritan’ experiment which was undertaken at a US campus with theological students. This showed that whatever the personal attitudes of the subjects and how caring they were, the propensity to help someone was driven mostly by whether […]

8. How Sticky is Your message?

Malcolm Gladwell in ‘The Tipping Point’ talks about the ‘Stickiness’ Factor.  ‘Stickiness’ of a message can result from small adjustments. In direct marketing it has been shown that a few changes in wording can change response rates by 25%. Gladwell uses as an example an experiment on a university campus. The project was to advertise […]

7. Gladwell’s Law of the Few

  Who are the few who make the difference? Amongst the Few, Gladwell identifies Connectors – people with a special gift for bringing the world together – Mavens – experts, information-spreaders and campaigners – and Salesmen – the persuaders who argue the case to others. As an example Gladwell uses Paul Revere’s midnight ride from […]

6. The Tipping Point: How Little Things can make a big difference

  Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 book links naturally with Seth Godin’s ideasvirus. It was described by the Daily Telegraph as “a wonderfully offbeat study of that little-understood phenomenon, the social epidemic”. He uses as examples Baltimore’s problem with syphilis, the Ride of Paul Revere that sparked the American War of Independence, New York’s success in reducing […]

5. And finally Seth Godin’s ‘Unleashing the Ideasvirus’

Godin published this book in 2001 – effectively a model for building a customer base in the world of new media opportunities. Word-of-mouth has always been important and been able to create rapid growth of awareness, but in the internet age this can be exponential. If the idea is right it will be taken up […]

4. Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow’ interpreted for small business

For Seth Godin the Purple Cow is the eighth P of marketing – along with Product, Price, Promotion, Place or route to market, People, Physical Presence (branding) and Process – and it stands for ‘Be remarkable’. Yes, he is cheating a bit, but you get the point. There are a number of lessons that small […]

3. Why play it safe?

Seth Godin’s interesting comment on the changed world of marketing is that the formula that worked well in the past – go for the vanilla flavour, the volume popular product that appeals to the mass market, and create a really great advertising campaign to push it – does not work any more. I don’t quite […]

2. So what has Seth to say to small business?

Seth Godin’s ‘Permission Marketing’ still focuses on what most small business would call large companies, but sings the praises of the flexibility of small business. I guess of the gurus he probably stands out as the one who is putting the labels on the marketing world in the post internet age. Whether he is truly […]

1. The Apprentice Hullaballoo

This blog was written after the end of a series of the TV show: The Apprentice, and it started me thinking about the relevance of large business experience to small business, and started a series of blogs that provide a round-up of classic business thinking but applied to small business. So everyone has had their say on […]

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