Crowdsourcing broadly means using the power of many to solve problems. The principal can be applied to any challenge where many hands can make light work. It’s a bit of a big deal. One that the B2B marketing community has thus far almost wholly ignored. Brands aren’t about guidelines or products or services, they’re about feelings. Rather than being restricted to the views of a few you can open up the brand discussion to the prospective customers.

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Honda has been undertaking extensive testing of sales people and customers within dealerships to monitor changes they go through during the process of buying a car. Customers are most relaxed when dealing with a sales person who delivers exactly the customer experience they say they’re going to, but research shows that the customer is most excited about their purchase about 10 minutes before the sales person. In a B2B context, Brand guardians would do well to ensure their brand promise is properly aligned to the customer expectation.

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The reality, for all but the staunchest marketing luddites, is that a business blog is about as close to the main artery of an audience as a business can get. It follows the primary Web2 protocol of allowing the audience to choose to engage with it or not, and when they do, the business achieves a voice, a following, a position of leadership. The blog becomes the source of opinion.

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I was called ‘inflexible’ the other day. Now, I’ve been called a goodly number of things in my time, but ‘inflexible’? Really? I thought I was a pretty relaxed kind of a guy (in a two steps from a coronary kind of a way…) I strive for ‘cool’. I may or may not achieve the [...]

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B2B Marketing Magazine has published an October Supplement focussing on Direct Marketing for the Small to Medium size Enterprise (SME). I was asked to contribute to the feature and thought you may like the comments. This is as the article appeared in the magazine, so they’ve edited out all my swearing. Again. Bastards. I’ve omitted [...]

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