Raising Your Invisible Ceiling on Growth

by Sid Raisch

Do you have a plan to break through your Invisible Ceiling this Spring?

Loyalty Programs - Group Sharing Footnotes

The following footnotes have been collected by Danny Summers from The Group during discussions on this subject at the time of developing this story. We plan to add additional ideas from others over time. These notes provide important additional Group guidance in developing or evaluating your program(s).

Loyalty Programs to Drive Sales & Customer Engagement

By Sam Kirkland, National Accounts Manager, Epicor Software
  ...with Group discussion footnotes added

[Footnotes have been collected by Danny Summers from The Group during discussions on this subject at the time of developing this story and are located at the end of this article. These notes provide important additional Group guidance in developing or evaluating your program(s).]

Making the "Emotional Connection"

by Danny Summers

Robert Hendrickson has pushed The Group for years now on some of the very best ways to tell your story and build that unique, emotional connection with the customer. This is the extreme opposite of selling by price and certainly much more effective than selling by the old standard of "feature and benefit" marketing.

#TheFallEvent2018 - Garden Answer's Laura and Aaron present...

"YES YOU CAN Reach Your Customers through Social Media!"

Laura and her husband, Aaron, started Garden Answer, a YouTube how-to gardening channel filled with style, expertise and helpful gardening knowledge, in 2014. Today, they attract over 300,000 YouTube channel subscribers and have generated over 25 million views of their YouTube gardening videos. Garden Answer has 2.2 million followers and over 450 million video views. Garden Answer has become quite a sensation in just a short  time, and the numbers are continually growing!

Their tremendous popularity has prompted industry brands like Proven Winners, Espoma, Gardener's Supply, and others, to partner with Garden Answer to reach consumers.

Reeling in the Non-Gardeners


An excerpt from Ball Publishing's GreenProfit
(With comments by Danny Summers)

This past week GreenProfit published an article as titled above. They posed the question: "How can you attract non-gardeners as new customers" to the three finalists in the 2018 Green Profit/Dümmen Orange Young Retailer Award competition, sponsored by Dümmen Orange and AmericanHort!

Value Up! Eliminating Value Confusion – (Part 2)

By Sid Raisch

In the first part of this article we discussed why the word “value” is easily misunderstood, and how this misunderstanding confuses our people. CLICK HERE to read it.

Now that we've cleared up the definition of value, let's use the word in its highest value. The best way to do this will be to get clear on the levels of value.

Eliminating Value Confusion

By Sid Raisch

We need to clear up some confusion over the word “value”.

We Americans are a confused lot. Our language does this to us. Some other languages have one meaning per word. We have many.

Dual meanings are confusing. I have learned that it is a sign of intelligence when toddler’s pickup dual meanings of words. Understanding of multiple definitions of a word is also a sign of intelligence among adults. So let’s understand the simple word “value”, in all its wonder, and amazing complexity, beginning with the textbook definition.

I have no idea where the dictionary is, so we’ll Google. Maybe the definition of value has changed with the Internet? Right from the beginning, the cause of confusion is evident. Value is both a Noun, with two definitions, and a Verb with two additional definitions.

Let Your Center's Brand ROCK! 

by Tom Kegley

In case you missed the GROUPtalk-Live session last Tuesday, "Let Your Center's Brand ROCK!" by Tom Kegley, you still the opportunity to see and hear what Tom has created. The session has been recorded and you have an invitation to view the entire presentation below. I want to stress a couple of points here... This is MUCH MORE than simply a redesign of a logo for America’s Best Flowers (which looks fabulous by the way). It begins with  a study of the "essence" or "core values" of the company. For America's Best Flowers, one word that was always in their logo and message was... Joy. Tom says there is so much of what we sell that creates Joy and how we experience that Joy is multifaceted through many senses. Creating a new logo incorporated the "essence" he and the staff at ABF agreed with and Tom also kept a rainbow of colors in the concept, except in a different way.

 

Integrate Your Marketing Communications for More Impact

by Tom Kegley

 

With so many ways to reach out to your customers– advertising, email, direct mail, in-store signage, events, social media, and more– it’s easy for your marketing communications to become diluted or disjointed. In today’s ocean of messaging, the isolated message gets lost.
 
No Message is an Island is a macro communications approach for today’s media. If you identify your big message, weave it into every channel you use to speak to your customers, and coordinate the execution, your marketing becomes so much more effective. Whether your campaign is for a weekend, a season, or the entire year, make it stronger by connecting your islands of messages into one giant continent.
________________________
Learn why and how No Message is an Island in 7 minutes in Tom’s moving online presentation.