What does it mean to be a Strategic Marketer?
Marketing is a unique and broad discipline. Unlike most areas within a company, marketing requires both open-minded creativity and strict rigorous analysis. Marketers not only set high-level agendas but also manage all the execution details.

Think You’re Selling a Commodity? Baloney! You never have to compete on price.
Marketing helps differentiate your product or service to deliver higher margins. But what if your product or service is, by nature, somewhat undifferentiated? If you’re in a price-competitive industry like trucking or equipment rental, are you doomed to competing on price? Worse yet, what if you sell cement? Or office whiteboards? What about bricks?

How to Identify your True Competitive Advantages
When good competitive strategy and solid marketing prowess meet, the result is business spice. To achieve this, a company must hold some competitive advantages, clearly identify them, and then leverage them through marketing. Without spice, the firm is just another bland alternative.

The Building Blocks of a Brand Platform
Long-term success requires more than creative tactics. It requires a strong brand. Whether B2B, consumer or non-profit, a multi-billion dollar company or small business, the fact is that the strength of a brand is directly related to a company’s success.

Building and Supporting Your Brand
What do you think of when you see Nike? Starbucks? Sony? How about companies in the B2B space, such as UPS? Google? These examples are names you know, but branding is definitely not name recognition. When you were reading the names above, what was the sum of all the thoughts and feelings you associated with them? That’s the brand.

Recognizing and Overcoming the Status Quo Trap—it’s Holding You Back!
Decision making skill is often a key component in what separates the successful from the unsuccessful in business. Assuming you accept this thesis, then the obvious question is “What can I do to make better decisions?”

Using the Power of Anchoring to Your Advantage
The psychological factors that influence strategic decision making in business can be quite interesting. If you want to do some reading, a couple of great books in this area are Decision Traps by Edward Russo and Paul Shoemaker and Influence—The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. Both touch on the concept of anchoring—how an initial number or concept powerfully affects our final analysis.

Games Minds Play and The Influence of Brand Perception
You know not to trust everything you hear, or read or even see. But what about what you think? Can you even trust that? For example: Coke or Pepsi? You probably believe you have a taste preference, but it’s all in your head.

Competitive Strategy and How to Sell a Dollar for More Than $1.00
While strategy is truly an art, there is a lot of knowledge to be found in the science of it. As in marketing, the more of the science you understand, the smarter you can execute the art. If you strip away the jargon and math, you’ll find a lot of value—whether you need to beat your competition if you’re in business, win office if you’re a politician, or raise a child if you’re a parent.

Using Behavioral Economics Principals to Improve Your Marketing
As human beings, losses loom larger to us than gains. It’s one of those proven quirks in the way we think. Understanding this concept, however, can help you enhance your marketing effectiveness.

The Marketing Plan—an Outline
A marketing plan helps your business reach its maximum potential. It allows your organization to see its situation more clearly, identify new opportunities and notice key areas for improvement. It provides a clear path to success that helps you best allocate scarce resources, align your team’s efforts and track and measure progress along the way. It’s a critical component in getting the most out of your marketing efforts.

How to Set Your Marketing Budget
The quality of the marketing will be the number one driver of overall results, but a company that invests too little in marketing will not realize its goals, and investing too much is just a waste.

Marketing is an Investment, Not an Expense
A successful business owner or two has said in the past, “I’ve gotten this far without marketing. I’m not a big believer.” Someone said, “Just think where you’d be if your company had been putting proper effort into marketing!”

Keeping Your Intellectual Property "Yours". Patents, Trademarks and Copyrights.
Whether it is your product, your technology, your expertise, your brand or something else, good differentiation can deliver competitive advantage. But of course if your competitors copy it, then your organization is no longer different. So how can you protect it?

Perception or Reality? Why You Need Both to Succeed.
Can you get away with so-so service and results, as long as you can convince prospects that you are golden? Or, if your organization is really good, can you forget about managing perceptions? You already know the answer. For a business to outshine its competitors, it must invest smartly in both.

Stay Strong Through a Recession and Emerge a Winner
In the worst economic downturns, the best of us look beyond the fear and recognize the opportunity. Downturns are when market share gains are there for the taking as your competition may be retreating. It's a great time for your company to build muscle (marketing strength) while you trim fat (waste and excess). It's also a great time to focus inward, evaluate your strategies and improve your processes.

12 Tips to Getting the Best Results from Customer Surveys
Are there aspects of your target market that you’d like to better understand? Do you know, from your customers’ point of view, exactly how you stack up against your competition in critical areas? Are you looking to discover opportunities to generate improved business results?

Marketing Automation—The Future of Lead Generation
Marketing automation is driving a dramatic shift in the B2B marketing landscape. Traditionally, Marketing and Sales have been near-adversaries. The promise of marketing automation is to turn that relationship into a coordinated and powerful partnership. It’s truly the future of lead generation. Instead of describing it, I thought I’d share a few scenarios where we’ve applied this for our clients.

Generating Demand with Search Engine Marketing (SEO & PPC)
When prospective customers are ready to buy, you want them to find your company. An effective search engine marketing program is often a great way to ensure that this happens. At Pepper Group, this includes a combination of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC).

The Four Letter Word that Begins with “F”. The Power of PR.
A strong marketing plan is an essential element to the growth of each and every company. Marketing can be a financially significant proposition, but it brings a great return on investment if properly executed. What many companies tend to forget is to leverage free publicity (the other four letter word that begins with F). Media outlets are always seeking newsworthy stories, so it’s important to take advantage of opportunities to attract the attention of potential customers in a way that advertising alone just can’t.

Landing the Big Ones
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a Chicago AMA seminar that really stuck with me: Landing the Big Ones: Achieving Explosive Sales Growth.

Social Media – The Reality vs. the Hype
Does our company have a Facebook page? Where’s our blog? Are we Twittering?... These common questions not only place tactics before strategy, they reflect some of the “irrational exuberance” surrounding social media marketing today. Social media is a great opportunity in B2B, but too many get lost in the hype and start focusing on the tools themselves. Instead, organizations should focus on their strategy and apply the tools that best fit that strategy.

High Impact, Low Cost Online Marketing Ideas
Looking for some ways to achieve impact while on a tight budget? Here are a few tactics that leverage new technologies and will help you enhance your sales efforts, reduce costs and reach your audience more effectively. Depending on your situation, some of these tactics could dramatically improve your marketing results!

Pepper Group’s Five Keys to a Great Name
Need to name a new product, service or company? It’s hard enough to name a dog, but let’s face it: nearly any name will work for man’s best friend. And the stakes are pretty low. Creating a name for a new product, service or company, however, is much more complex.

How to Make Your Message Stick
Why do some messages just stick with you, while others are quickly forgotten? For example, why do we remember precisely what happened to that guy who was approached by a beautiful woman in a hotel bar and woke up in a bathtub missing a kidney, yet we can’t recall that new corporate strategy that was announced last month?

The Influence of Color
Quick, what color comes to mind when you think of stop, caution or purity? How about cherry, kiwi, lemon? How about UPS, IBM, Caterpillar? Colors have associations.

Strategy Shmategy—When Messages Get Noticed but Miss the Mark
A recent news photo caught my attention. In fact, it didn’t just catch my attention; it reached out and grabbed it. After reading the caption, I couldn’t help but think, “You got my attention, Ahn Sang-kyu, but your communication strategy was just a bit off the mark.”

Five Common Graphic Identity Pitfalls
You don’t have to be a design specialist to know when a logo is not working. If you can’t read it easily, have trouble figuring out what it means or are just terribly unimpressed, you can tell something went amiss.

Three Tips for Spicier Writing
Want to punch up your marketing communications? Follow these simple tips to more effective copy.

Is it Time to Upgrade Your Website’s Design?
In 2008, we decided to audit our own website. We quickly realized that we had come a long way in the years since our last redesign. Despite our busy schedules focusing on creating fabulous client work, we made the time to reflect on ourselves and how our brand was representing whom we are and where we are today.

The Myth of Cheap Crowd-Sourced Design
“There are a ton of designers who will work cheap, so let’s get online and save a bundle!” Maybe you’ve heard this, or been tempted yourself, but stop and ask one of the most important strategic questions. “What are we trying to accomplish?” Most likely the answer isn’t to make something pretty. More often, it will be to add value to the business or drive results.

The Importance of a Call to Action
In an effort to get new prospects and generate leads, many B2B companies decide to do direct mail campaigns with a goal of “getting their name out there.”

Ten Tips for Trade Show Success
These ten tips are just an introduction, but if you follow these guidelines closely, you can be confident that you are approaching trade shows in an effective manner.

Identify and Handle the Six Types of Trade Show Visitors
Attendees visit for various reasons, and it’s a good idea to develop a few key questions that will help your team quickly recognize the various types and act appropriately. Visitors to your booth will probably fall into one of these categories.

How to Avoid BPD (Boring PowerPoint Disorder)
If you have ever attended a seminar, a large meeting or sat through a lecture, you have probably experienced BPD—Boring PowerPoint Disorder. Possibly you are even guilty of passing on this syndrome at least once.

On Screen and in Print. DPI, Resolution, and RGB vs. CMYK
A picture is worth a thousand words. Whether they are professional shots, computer-generated images or snaps from your digital camera, using pictures within your marketing communications is a complex but important business. While a great image communicates well, a poor image will hurt your image.

Social Media Advertising
Recently, the two undisputed social networking leaders, LinkedIn and Facebook, both upped their advertising ante. Whether targeting businesses or consumers, these sites now offer marketers new ways to reach a very specific audience with a very specific message.

The Six Critical Components of a Direct Marketing Campaign
Executed correctly, direct marketing can be an excellent way for many companies to reach prospective new customers and build sales. One of the advantages of direct marketing is the ability to deliver a targeted message to a specific audience. It’s more personal than advertising, usually more cost effective and directly measurable.

Why Customers Leave
Smart marketers know that it takes much less money to retain a current customer than to acquire a new one. Too often, marketing efforts become overly focused on new customer acquisition. The key is to strike the right balance.

Negotiate Without Caving
Here are a few ideas for what you can ask in return the next time your buyer asks for a discount or some other concession.

Measuring Clicks Vs. Measuring Results
Pay Per Click Advertising, also known as PPC, is something that has exploded over the past several years. It’s something that is accessible to everyone, something that even those who have little to no marketing or advertising experience can understand and implement. What differentiates the pros from the novices, however, is a knowledge and understanding of what it is that really makes a PPC campaign successful.