Marketing

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Five Things Marketers Can Take Away from Politics

Posted on by skulkaew

As we approach the finish line of yet another election, millions of Americans are gearing up to head to the polls to exercise their right to vote. And while it may seem as though presidential elections have become decided largely by likeability versus policy or competency, that might not be as surprising a change as it seems. In 1960, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon squared off in the first televised presidential debates in what proved to be a key turning point in both of their campaigns. An estimated 70M viewers tuned in. Nixon, who had not yet recovered from a two week long hospital stay, looked pale, sickly, was about 20 pounds underweight and tired from having campaigned until just a few hours prior to the broadcast. Kennedy, by contrast, having spent the early part of September campaigning in California, was tanned, confident and well rested. Nixon later wrote, “I had never seen him looking so fit.”

Those who heard the broadcast on the radio pronounced Nixon the winner, but those who watched it on TV thought otherwise. They focused on what they saw and not what they heard. What they saw was a candidate who was frail and sickly who was very obviously discomforted by his younger opponent’s smooth and charismatic delivery. Of their four debates, the consensus is that Nixon won bouts two and three, and that the two men drew in debate number four, but it was too late. Between the first and second debates, it was reported that there was a drop off in 20M some odd viewers. As a result, Kennedy, who had been trailing by a small deficit up until this point in the campaign, gained a little bit of traction that gave him a slight lead. And in November, he was elected the 34th President of the United States.

While you and I might not see eye-to-eye on how things should shake out come November, we can probably agree that since the first televised debates, politics have become increasingly focused on the marketing component as opposed to the policy aspect. Listed below are a few pointers taken straight from the political arena that marketers can use in their daily grind. If nothing else, it might help should you decide to run for office one day.

Anticipate

Whether it is a candidate, issue or product, the ability to change rapidly and respond effectively is character of resilience. Successfully running a business extends past identifying consumers’ needs to anticipating how that might evolve in the future. Take the time to plan for the ups and downs, and you’ll be better prepared to navigate through the unknown and capitalize if and when opportunity knocks.

Be Consistent

The best way to avoid flip-flopping back and forth on an issue is to clearly define your messaging early on. This requires a well thought out plan as well as both courage and conviction. The problem, both in the private sector and in politics, is that messaging focuses more on winning than on being sincere. Stick to your guns here. And if you happen to be wrong, own up to it.

Use Multiple Channels

While the Internet and social media have changed advertising and marketing by and large, candidates are known for utilizing every channel available (TV, radio, outdoor, e-mail, bumper stickers, buttons, etc). Politicians play for keeps, and that means reinforcing their position in the minds of constituents at every opportunity possible. Finding out who you want to target and where they’ll be is half the battle.

Measure Your Progress

Political candidates know if they’re ahead or behind and by exactly how much. If you want to be successful, you need to figure out what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. If certain forms of content are performing better than other types, stick to what works instead of expending precious time on something that doesn’t.

Be Transparent

John Adams wrote, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right and a desire to know.” In a world filled with bloggers; Tweeters; and ever connected social media users, consumers and constituents alike want to know where their money is going and if the companies they support are operating ethically so be forthright.

It’s pretty clear that the coming election will make for one of the most heated in recent memory. If you haven’t registered to vote or aren’t sure if your registration is current, you can check here to see. If you need to register or have questions about voting, this should help.

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One Year

Posted on by skulkaew

This upcoming Sunday, the 26th, marks one year since I moved to Los Angeles from Dallas. If you’ve ever moved to a city you knew basically nothing about, you know how difficult finding an apartment or home is. But to be fair, it’s actually kind of a pain even if you’re only moving a mile down the road. Though the Internet enables you to browse through reviews of neighborhoods and properties, look at crime maps as well as check out schools, attractions and so on, it really only prepares you so much. I learned that lesson the day I signed my first lease here in a seemingly okay neighborhood only to find an intruder in my bathroom later on that very evening. With just one month left on my lease, the apartment hunting process has begun. What’s interesting is that as I invest more and more time into digging through what seems like an endless list of potential options, I’m starting to see the similarities, namely recurring problems, that pop up here and in both graphic design and advertising.

First and foremost, it’s no secret that the cost of living in Los Angeles is high. That’s reflected in everything from a gallon of milk to a gallon of gas. While I can’t afford to live in a 5,000-squarefoot mansion in the Hollywood hills, I’m very adamantly against the idea of living in a 300-squarefoot bare boned “bachelor pad” even if it is the most practical option from an economic standpoint. With regards to marketing and advertising, don’t assume that spending more correlates with yielding more. Research shows that there isn’t a positive relationship between the cost of an ad’s production and its corresponding sales effectiveness. If you’re operating on fairly limited ad budget, remember that it doesn’t take superhuman strength to move a 500lbs rock. One only needs a fulcrum, a lever and a little knowhow. There are a countless number of free resources, tools and forums you can use online to beef up your marketing efforts. All you have to do is put in the time.

Second, remember that all the marketing and spin in the world won’t fix a crappy product. Having spent a lot of time perusing about on Craigslist, I’ve gotten pretty good at eliminating lemons from the bunch by quickly skimming through listings. If you do find yourself looking for a new place, know that if at any part of a listing mentions “old world charm,” that usually means it’s haunted. Not really. But the 100-year-old building will usually look pretty scary so taking a pass is prudent for those who haven’t completely disqualified the existence of ghosts (e.g., me). Outside of apartment hunting, a brand’s strengths depend on more than just its name and the hype surrounding it. It’s dependent on the public’s perception of its quality. If a product is deficient in some way or another, that will show as soon as someone actually uses it, at which point they’ll probably decide to never repeat that mistake.

Finally, call it what you will but a big part of my decision making process in finding a new home is knowing that I’m going to spend a lot of time at this place. Maybe, I’m overly sentimental. On the short side, that might only be 12 months, though it may end up being much longer, but a one-year lease can certainly feel like an eternity if you get locked into something that’s not at all what you thought it would be [think: haunted apartment from point number two]. But in all seriousness, a home is more than bricks and mortar. Outside of being the place where I sleep, eat, shower, play videogames and so on, it’s where I can get away from the craziness that is Los Angeles. Provide more than just what’s necessary, and you stand to separate yourself from the pack.

Here’s to another year and not finding intruders in my next place, in the bathroom or otherwise.

 

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Picking & Choosing

Posted on by skulkaew

I was at the mall this last weekend, passing some time before seeing The Dark Knight Rises when I stopped in at a T.J. Maxx. As strange as it may sound, I really enjoy stopping by stores of the like just so I can peruse through the home and electronics sections. It’s not so much because I expect to buy something useful at a heavily discounted price. I just like the random goods. The typical electronic section at a store like T.J. Maxx or Ross consists of digital tire pressure gauges, the perfect pushup, cheap headphones and a whole slew of other products that have escaped various recalls over the years. There’s no order or sense to it. This last time I was there, I snagged a leather travel size grooming kit complete with tweezers, nail clippers, hair trimmers and more for $13. Sadly, but not too surprisingly, the trimmers didn’t work. Even with new batteries, they refused to turn on. Was I mad? No, not really. Part of buying something at a heavily discounted price has a lot to do with implicitly acknowledging the fact that I might be settling for a suboptimal product, and I think that’s perfectly acceptable because I would rather skimp on a replaceable grooming kit than say, my health insurance.

When you think about it, businesses aren’t all that different in that they have to pick and choose which investments will best serve them. Because most startups don’t have much going as far as cash flow goes in their infancy, they bootstrap. Bootstrapping means using the startup capital available, which typically consists of personal savings, credit cards and loans, and trying to extend that as far as possible while keeping other costs down because you can’t spend money you’re not making, not for forever at least. Amongst some of the common tips for reducing expenditures is keeping teams lean by hiring only those critical to success, giving out equity versus cash upfront, outsourcing and, lastly, cutting back on marketing and public relations. Mark Cuban, to the ire of the PR industry, pointed that out when he blogged about the last point. To summarize, he said that the cost of the service and its actual value are misaligned, and that a CEO or someone on the management team should be tasked with outbound communication to garner buzz and media coverage. It’s only later on, once a company has matured and passed this phase, that it might be more practical as time becomes the more valuable commodity. But right out of the gates, it’s better to skimp on something on like marketing and advertising rather than something critical, like electricity.

When you think about it, all of this is more obvious than it is revolutionary. If I were trying to sell you a car, we probably wouldn’t disagree that owning a vehicle has value though that much depends more so on where you live. Coming from Texas, I can assure you that not having one there is terrible when everything you need to go to is far and wide apart, and the public transportation system is abysmal. But just because car ownership has value doesn’t mean you should go out and buy one right this minute. You might not be in a position to for any number of reasons.

That being said, the same is true for the services we offer. Bravo Design, Inc. develops really great websites, and our design and print production work is bar none. While I may have violated some unspoken rule of blogging with what might sound like shameless promotion, it doesn’t make the prior statement any less true. I’ve written a few articles on design since I started here, but I thought this would be a good time to point out the elephant in the room. Attractive products with better aesthetics, whether that comes down to packaging design or an item itself, are going to be chosen over ones that don’t have those qualities. A better looking, better functioning website is going to be perceived as more authoritative, and more attractive marketing collateral is not only going to command more attention. It lends itself more credibility. I’m sorry. I didn’t make the rules. You might disagree with all of the above but if you were having chronic migraines, you’d probably trust WebMD over this Geocities site though you should definitely contact your general practitioner before attempting to diagnose thyself.

Employing a professional designer might not be in your cards for the near future. But when the time does come, we’d like for you to keep us in mind. Your website, and all of your marketing collateral equate to interactions with your prospective clients. We’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating. We recommend you put your best foot forward.

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Media Agnosticism

Posted on by skulkaew

This is actually a response to an article I recently read on media agnosticism, maybe more so a rant. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. I’ll get to defining that here in a bit. It’s a buzzword and an ambiguous one at that. I just wanted to write this because I was frustrated that the article was so brazenly misleading. I’d post a link to it, but the downside that could ensue outweighs any benefit almost exponentially. I have little interest [read as: none whatsoever] in a full-blown argument on the Internet. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a bigger time suck.

Back in February, I wrote an article on cross-channel marketing (CCM) and then, a little later, another on actionable metrics but failed to connect the dots between the two. The take away is that marketing is hard. No, that’s not it although it is. The point I should have emphasized is that different jobs require different tools just like a DIY project at home would. Functionality aside, you probably wouldn’t use a chainsaw to fix the piping under your kitchen sink or a garden trowel to dig up a tree if you had better tools available because of the differences in scale. What this comes down to is evaluating your goals and objectives as well as figuring out which touch points are most effective for reaching out to potential consumers because the mediums you use to reach your end consumer are separate and NOT equal. Cold calling is different than commercials on TV, which are different than spots on the radio, which are different than social media, which is different than an interactive event and so on.

This should all be fairly obvious, and that’s not to say that you can’t use them together for an integrated campaign. You can, and you should. What I mean is that each has its unique set of attributes as well as its own limitations that differ from one channel to the next. That’s where the term media agnosticism comes in, also referred to as being media or channel neutral. It’s planning that’s impartial and avoids bias towards a particular platform or strategy – until due diligence helps determine the best way(s) to engage the right consumer given the goals and objectives of the media campaign. The point being that whatever process is used to produce the solution should not be biased or predisposed towards any particular outcome.

While this all might seem pretty intuitive, the concept gets lost amongst all the noise put out by the snake oil salesmen and pseudo experts of the Internet. “SEO will put you at the forefront.” “Facebook will catalyze engagement.” “PPC will affect your bottom line.” Yeah, maybe.  Each of those services could definitely make your business more visible, but that doesn’t automatically translate towards sustainable success. Why is that though? Because search engine optimization won’t save your business if you have huge, fundamental problems in your marketing and advertising strategy. A “like” you receive on your social media network of choice is different than one that Starbucks or Coke receives on theirs. Why? Because for a major brand, that additional impression has a dollar value attached to it. For someone with little to no brand recognition, it’s inconsequential. And the claim that PPC would save a business with the aforementioned problems is laughable. The article I mentioned in the opening of this entry wrote that media agnosticism was “bullsh*t” on the basis that it takes a single piece of collateral, say a TV spot, and tries to apply that voice to the rest of a campaign. That’s not media agnosticism. That’s bad advertising. From there, the writer extrapolates that those foolish enough to believe messaging can make that jump are only willing to chase down big ideas and creates deficiencies in the creative process. One, seriously? And two, that’s just silly. We’re not looking for the golden gun here. Progress is made one step at a time.

To clarify, I’m no Pelé of marketing, advertising or anything else really, and I do make mistakes. Well, I’m pretty good at Halo 3 and being snide, but I haven’t found a way to monetize either. That being said, my advice isn’t infallible. No one’s is. The thing is that I read. A lot. If you’re running a business or are in the process of starting one, you should too. Why? Because your business, or the company you work for, is probably different than most and positioned to serve some segments of the market better than others. And on the receiving end, faced with a seemingly endless number of ways to consume media, your prospective customers are receiving information through a slew of different channels. Some potential clients will seek out recommendations. Some will do research online to seek out reviews. Some might just find you by taking the path of the least resistance. That being said, how you leverage your knowledge and experience will probably be different if you sell shrunken heads versus if you have a lemonade stand. If I were doing the former, I’d probably have to find a niche market on some underground forum to advertise my product because it’s probably illegal. And if I was doing the latter, I might just make signage on poster board to target passing traffic as opposed to posting 324 tweets a day.

How you go about your business, down to how you gloss over seemingly inane details, is working against your best intentions. You might get your marketing and advertising right on the first try, or the process could be one that iterates itself over and over like it is for the rest of us. Ultimately, media neutral panning might mean more than putting habits and assumptions aside. It might require stepping back altogether and thinking outside of the box. Don’t play favorites just use what works best.

 

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Brand Attraction

Posted on by skulkaew

By and large, people buy goods and services for two reasons. One, to get rid of a problem they have and don’t want. Or two, to create a result they want but don’t have. By doing so, they believe it will improve their lives in some way, shape or form. And since any decision affecting your life is largely an emotional one, marketers, advertisers and/or sellers need to appeal to prospective customers on an emotional level.

Traditionally, the retail value equation was predicated on offering the best features at the lowest price. But because features can be, and usually are, copied shortly after introduction, cutthroat pricing dictated consumer behavior. When you take into account the evolution of the global competitive landscape and the shift in consumer priorities, you realize a new equation is mandatory. That much is evident from the rise of startups and the decline of retail giants whose business models were either unsustainable or are unable to compete in an ever-changing marketplace. The new equation should take into account quality and customer service, where expense takes a back seat to appeal, and arrives at a competitive price. It might not be the lowest price, but it needs to feel appropriate to the customer. Because in their most basic form, brands are extensions of belief systems. Their promise is a succinct expression that states what customers can come to expect when interacting with brands whether that be online or at the store. How can you ramp up your brand attraction? By dressing it up and maximizing its appeal. That doesn’t mean stop improving your product, customer service and/or the overall experience. That process is never ending. What it means is that you get to cast the light on your business in the most favorable way. Here are a few considerations to make when playing to your strengths.

Presence creates potential. How your marketing collateral and website look will determine how the public perceives you and your business and can decide how successful future marketing campaigns will do. Design is an essential part of any marketing campaign, and a necessity to compete in a media driven world, and it’s one of the easiest ways to separate your business from the competition. It’s the difference in a 40% bounce rate on your landing page and one that hovers around 10,000%. That’s actually not possible but rest assured that you are being judged at every single touch point by the very people you’re targeting.

Genuine interaction is key to building deeper relationships, but spamming out quasi-useless information won’t help you on this front. I included this in our entry on New Year Resolutions, but it’s worth repeating. More important than tweeting a frazillion times a day is having something compelling to say. One of the many upsides to social media is that it’s another platform for your prospects to touch base with you and vice versa. Thoughtful engagement will catalyze the development in a relationship that might otherwise take months or years to form.

Exude positivity in your messaging tempered with real-world insight. If your collateral contains brazen claims with little or no information, your prospects are likely to grow suspicious. Conversely, if you sound like a wet towel when it comes to your own business, those very same prospects might assume that you’re offering an inferior product. It’s a necessity that you and your brand instill confidence, all while building awareness and encouraging engagement. Being real and down-to-earth can help you build trust with your prospects who are likely to be skeptical.

Your reputation is the lifeblood of your brand so make sure your brand stays true to what you’re offering while producing great results. A group of brand champions can enhance a brand’s image in the same way a group of unhappy customers can tarnish it. If you don’t already know, you’ll soon find that brand development is an ongoing process that iterates over and over again. The goal is to eventually move past attraction and engage with fans, followers and prospects, so that they become customers. From there, you can make the shift from acquisition to retention. Knowing your consumers and what’s important to them as well as being able to align that with your advertising efforts is the key to creating value for them and for your company.

Photo credit: Melificent.com

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The Psychology of Advertising

Posted on by skulkaew

Most of our supermarket purchases are habitual. From a consumer’s point of view, a trip to the grocery store is pretty straightforward. We don’t tend to put a lot of cognitive effort into most of our purchases, and we typically choose the same brands week after week. So to convert potential consumers, supermarkets create dissonance.

Retailers employ different varieties of stimuli (e.g., color, smells, music, etc.) to affect consumer behavior. Color has been considered to be the most salient, resonant and affective feature seen in human vision. It contributes to the appreciation of and preference for products and plays an essential communication role, improves the efficacy of messages and may increase the likelihood of a purchase. The olfactory sense, or the sense of smell, has been the subject of study in several papers published in the marketing field. In an experiment performed exposing individuals to 26 different ambient scents of varying intensity, as well as a neutral control group, subjects in the scented condition perceived that they had spent less time in the store. Those in the no scent condition perceived having spent significantly more time in the store than they actually did (Spangenberg, Crowley, and Henderson, 1996). Surprisingly, whether the scent was pleasing or not had no effect. Neither did intensity. One of the most famous research studies in marketing (Gorn, 1982) used classical conditioning and illustrated that hearing well-liked music versus disliked music, while being exposed to a product, can directly affect product preferences as measured by product choice.

Going back to the supermarket, entryway placement and layout have a significant effect on how people shop and how much they spend. Generally speaking, items with the highest profit margins are placed on shelves that are at shoppers’ eye level. Less profitable brands will be stocked at the top of a shelf or near your feet. Contrary to intuition, shoppers don’t walk up and down aisles. Research of movement patterns using GPS trackers show that people tend to travel in select aisles, using the perimeter of the shop as the main thoroughfare, and rarely in a systematic up and down pattern. People, who do venture into the center of aisles, tend to spend more time in the shop but not necessarily more money. What this means is that key products, ones with the higher profit margins, will typically be placed at the ends of aisles in end cap displays. Familiar household brands will also be placed here to serve as a psychological “welcome mat,” which results in increased traffic.

Psychology of Advertising, Bravo DesignDespite the fact that consumers generally indicate that they make rational purchasing decisions based on considerations like price, selection or convenience, subconscious forces, involving emotion and memories, are clearly also at work. Scientists used to assume that emotion and rationality were opposed to each other, but Antonio Damasio, now professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has found that people who lose the ability to perceive or experience emotions as the result of a brain injury find it hard or impossible to make any decisions at all.

Perception involves the process of categorization and extends to selection and interpretation, as well as gauging risk and opportunity cost(s), to produce meaning. In the process, buyers make use of cues as they’re bombarded with stimulation at all times of the day. However, only parts are successfully transferred and categorized as information. The consumer chooses what information to factor in, as well as what to dismiss. This differentiation between stimulation and information sets a distinction between two types of cues individuals are faced with. A stimulus cue is a conspicuous stimulus somewhere in the sensory field toward which attention can be drawn or directed, whereas an information cue is a bit of information about a marketing stimulus. Not only do advertisers need to draw the attention of consumers, they need to simultaneously argue the case for their product. Between marketing, advertising and design, each discipline recognizes that a psychological component should be taken into consideration at every point of engagement. Behavioral factors are also carefully taken into account because, ultimately, an advertisement isn’t meant to just attract attention, but to actually influence consumers to buy products. Generally speaking, advertising may be one of the most carefully constructed of all human communication as it is certainly one of the most costly.

Psychology of Advertising, Bravo DesignBrand development and maintenance demands a combination of functional, operational and psychological elements to create a unique entity that has a lasting personality, which will build retail brand awareness with existing and potential customers. When a brand has a well-defined personality, consumers interact with it and develop a relationship that can influence individual attitudes and behaviors in terms of how consumers perceive and react to a brand. A successful retail brand will help to build long-term demand, add some perceived value and ultimately improve sales. Consumers will be willing to pay more for a brand if there is added actual, or perceived, value from their experience of using the product or service. Because ultimately, they’re purchasing a total experience consisting not only of the physical item but also the packaging, after sales services, promotions and image.

Advertising is a ubiquitous and powerful force that lulls consumers into buying wanted, and sometimes unwanted, products that can change lifestyles for better or worse. The impact of advertising is often subtle and implicit but, sometimes, booming and impossible to overlook. Messaging aims to convince, or pair, target audiences with solutions to problems they may, or may not, know they have which may lead to a potential purchase or impulse buy. By and large, studies show that the effectiveness of psychological application will continue to impact advertising in a huge way, both online and off, as methodology is fine-tuned and studies unearth the motivations that compel consumers to make specific purchases.

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Providing Versus Promoting

Posted on by skulkaew

It’s difficult to say when and where marketing has its definitive roots, as people have been trading for thousands of years, but it took the shape we’re most familiar with some time during the Industrial Revolution. It was then that firms were able to ramp up production on a significantly larger scale for national and international markets due to the innovation and adoption of machines. As a result, consumption became dispersed over greater geographical distances, and producers no longer had immediate contact with their consumers.

To overcome this problem, forward thinking entrepreneurs started to plan their business operations in a marketing orientated manner. Their very survival was at stake. This demanded they be innovative and creative to stand apart. In order for producers to manufacture goods and services that would appeal and sell in widely disparate markets, it became necessary for them to carefully analyze and interpret the wants and needs of customers.

Fast forward to 2012, and we can see that firms are still being challenged to address those very same issues in segments that may be nearly impossible to breakthrough due to the sheer amount of competition or lack thereof. As marketing, as a whole, continues to evolve and be refined, companies are recognizing the increased strategic value of leveraging emerging technology, maintaining an optimized online presence, deploying content marketing, engaging with consumers before and after sales via social media and so on and so forth. Sadly enough, that recognition doesn’t necessarily translate into measureable success. The truth is, one of the primary reasons, new products fail is because companies fall short when it comes to providing a high-quality product or service or when it comes to effectively promoting it in the marketplace.

Today, expressing and delivering on your value proposition is one of the most important activities you and your business can engage in. It’s your promise of performance and value aimed at creating and occupying space in your prospective consumers’ minds as the best solution available.

When it comes to evaluating initiatives to launch and pursue, the simple fact of the matter is that most businesses aren’t aware they’re pursuing a bad idea. Let’s say that, hypothetically, you’ve come up with what you believe is a great idea, or product, as well as a business strategy to roll out alongside it. Maybe you already have. Because you’ve worked so close to it, and may have a teeny tiny amount of bias, it’s easy to get hunkered down in your own perspective and not see the bigger picture. In order to evaluate new ideas, you need to be dispassionate and fact-based. Not all bad products are total losses. Some just need tinkering. If you can change direction, or pull the plug early enough in the process, the downside risk can be mitigated. Of course, some ideas are destined to fail, so you have to ask yourself if you honestly believe it can succeed. If the answer is yes, can you find the due diligence to support that?

As a sidebar, failure isn’t a “bad” thing. It’s a learning experience, and it’s something we all inevitably come across. When Thomas Edison, one of the most prolific inventors in history, failed time and time again at improving the incandescent light bulb, he pressed forward only saying, “We now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb.” He later prevailed.

From there, having a strong product or service doesn’t remove the need for promotion. It just increases the likelihood that your consumers and affiliates will do some of that for you. If your business doesn’t include marketing in determining which products to develop and pursue then, at best, it’s missing a big opportunity and, at worst, it’s setting itself up for failure. As a public relations major in school, my classmates and I analyzed case studies by using SWOT. That stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. By doing so, you can figure out how to leverage and capitalize while not overextending yourself in areas where you might not have depth. In a nutshell, the risk in making a bet is defined by its potential downside. That can be anything from time and money to the opportunity cost(s) associated with not following initiatives A, B and C. You’ll just have to discern which gambles will be best for you.

The most compelling value propositions address high priority concerns and reduce the risk and opportunity cost, for the consumer, associated with the purchase.  They’re clear and concise, distinguish the value and provide evidence that substantiates those claims. Even more important is the fact that you deliberately act on it. That’s the difference between providing versus promoting. Promoting is saying that you’re better and unique for X, Y and Z reasons. Providing is proving it. Warren Buffett, the Oracle from Omaha, says, “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” What are your end consumers getting?