Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Regardless of your industry, a collective body of knowledge exists. These best practices help to identify how like organizations have faced similar challenges.

How to find best practices:

• Identify the area(s) that you’re interested in exploring. Don’t limit yourself to simply your industry, but think about your target audience, your geographic reach or complementary products or services.
• Talk to your trade association. Many trade associations have research databases that provide a wealth of information on industry trends.
• For specific best practices related to public relations and marketing, industry resource sites such as MarketingProfs and Marketing Sherpa are terrific. If you’re a PRSA member, you can access the association’s knowledge base.

Best practices, however, shouldn’t stymie creativity or result in simply following the status quo, but provide inspiration and lessons learned.

Millennials. Who are they?

There is a new generation of Americans emerging: they number more than two for every baby boomer (73 million at last count), spend $150 billion a year, influence another $50 billion in family purchases – making the total $200 billion, and they grew up on MTV and the internet.

Millennials, or Generation Y, were born between 1977 and 1997. This generation is already a huge market force with a power that will only grow as today’s teenagers become adults.

Why is this important?

In order to communicate with Millennials, many of us will need to learn a new language.

In the next few posts, we will explore some of the differences between Millennials and the generations before them. Including: differences in technology and values.

Stay tuned.

I Love the Smell of Commerce in the Morning

I love bareMinerals SPF 15 Foundation. I love it so much that I can’t stop telling anyone who will listen about the makeup’s silky, feather-light, and yet complete, coverage. The makeup will revolutionize your morning routine forever and I’ve recently turned a handful of friends into believers.

According to the smart folks over at the Church of the Customer Blog, I am a customer evangelist—someone who is so thrilled about their experience with a product or service that they wholeheartedly support the company.

In Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force, bloggers and authors Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba outline the value of building strong customer relationships along with six basic elements of creating customer evangelists.

Creating advocates takes more than just a good product (although, that’s a good place to start). It takes brand loyalty, open dialogue, addressing customer feedback and improving product quality.

A front-page story in a prominent newspaper or product endorsement by an afternoon talk show diva might prompt me to put on my consumerism hat and head to the mall, but in the end, I still trust a good friend with a stellar word of mouth recommendation.

We might not be friends (yet), but bareMinerals is great. You should try it.

- Michelle

(nod to Mallrats for the title)