Win-Stay, Lose-Shift: A Marketing StrategyWritten by Susan Dunn, Coach
When you're in marketing, you often have to explain to a disgruntled CEO or manager why you want to abandon your original year's plan and move on to something else. You may even have been asked, as I have, "If I hire you will you stick with a plan that you make all year?" unspoken inference being -- like all rest of my marketing people, expletive deleted. Well here's a paradigm for why we do what we do in marketing that can solidfy your strategies, and perhaps be used to explain them to significant others. Consider "Win-Stay, Lose-Shift" Theory from behavioral psychology. It's very simple to understand, and amazingly difficult to put into practice. Nor have I heard terms used. If you don't use win-stay, lose-shift strategy, you're in "keep doing what you've been doing and you'll keep getting what you've been getting" position. Everything we do now we learned at one time or another through what's called "reinforcement" in behavioral psychology. We learned that doing certain things brought desirable results, and doing certain other things brought undesirable results. And then we learned to stay with winning strategy, and if it was a losing strategy, to try something different: Win-Stay, Lose-Shift.
| | A Battle Of Products Or A Battle Of Perceptions?Written by Noel Peebles
Marketing is not a battle of products; it's a battle of perceptions. It doesn't matter if you have best product or service; it's what people think that counts. That is not to say that you shouldn't have a good product or service - it is a prerequisite of doing business these days. Customers expect it. Like it or not, it can be difficult to change a mind once it is made up. It can cost mega-bucks to blast your way into a prospects mind, because most of us don't like to change our minds. Once people perceive you one way, it can be very difficult and expensive to change this perception. They file you away in their minds as a certain type of business offering a certain type of product or service. To put it another way - it is better to be first in a
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