These are great words until they are used so often that they become clichés.   At that point people use them because they are not (get this) CREATIVE!

Are you perpetrating the same sin in describing your business?  Advertising and marketing can be expensive.  Don’t waste this valuable opportunity on clichés. 

No one believes your “service is second to none” or cares that you have a “knowledgeable, courteous staff.”   Stop using clichés. 

You can certainly do better.    After all, you are a creative problem solver, with extensive experience, and dynamic communication skills.

Children learn at an early age the importance of repetition. They know that persistence pays off. Kids have absorbed into their snot-nosed, stinky-haired, pee-stained, spongy little bodies that they can elicit a response if they ask for something often enough.

Frequency works. Two year olds know it. Dogs even know that if they bark long enough their weak-willed master will give in. So why are advertisers so hard to convince?  The simple answer is, “No one knows for sure what the correct frequency is.”

Frequency is just the number of times customers are exposed to your message. being in the advertising business for a number of years exposes you to several theories. Three times? Six times? Nine exposures?  Maybe there is a formula tossed around by shyster consultants that make sense to you.

The most popular idea remains, contact the same person 3 times in seven nights sleep. That seems to be the magic number to create top of mind awareness. But the real answer to the question, “How many times does someone have to be exposed to my commercial?”

Until it works!

 (read the Mike Zuckerman article)

The recession ushered in a new era of austerity, where over-spending became a dangerous enemy for most shoppers.  A renewed focus on “the list” ensued.  However even in this climate, impulse shopping lives on.

For routine shopping trips – like grocery, shoppers have an internal mental calculator that they use to regulate their purchases.  If that is so – how can anyone buy on impulse?  The answer is that about 25% of the shopper’s total budget is subconsciously set aside for opportunistic buys.  According to a 2010 study by Dr. Kirk Wakefield at Baylor University, shoppers don’t deviate much from their budgets, but they still have plenty of impulse buys…things that are not on their list in the pre-shop.

(read more from ShopperRevolution.com)

Not in the way you might think. Recently, Gallup conducted research with more than 17,000 social media users — evaluating everything from the latest mobile social media apps to old-school word-of-mouth. We discovered groundbreaking new insights into how people interact with social media and into its effectiveness as a marketing tool.

These findings debunk three big myths regarding social media: that it effectively drives customer acquisition, that social networkers are all the same, and that social networking is an online-only phenomenon. But more important to companies spending tons of money on social media initiatives, Gallup’s research also suggests practical actions that can make these efforts more effective.

(read the story by Blaise James and Jim Asplund)

The company is Fourth Wall Restaurants and the restaurant is the Smith & Wollensky steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan. Each day from Oct. 3 through 31, a faithful customer of Smith & Wollensky will see his or her name replace the “Smith” on the brand trappings of the restaurant like signs, awnings, matchbooks, cocktail napkins and waiters’ jackets.

The promotion is going by this description: “Pledge allegiance to us and we’ll change our name to yours.” Information can be found on the restaurant’s Web site, smithandwollenskynyc.com.

Visitors to the site are directed to a section labeled “pledge” where they are asked to avow their fealty to the vittles dished up by Smith & Wollensky at Third Avenue and 49th Street.

(read Stuart Elliott’s article)

Learning is at the heart of customer loyalty management and has been ever since the empirical work of Reichheld [2] (and others) in the early 1990’s showed that customer loyalty is directly related to corporate profits. Learning about customers and remembering them is central to the task of managing customer relationships.

(read Tim Tyler’s article)

How you apologize to customers will determine how those customers view you and your company for a long time.

Here is an email I saw from Backcountry.com after they made a mistake. Note the sincerity of the wording as you read:

(read Joe Rawlinson’s article )

(see the Ads from Adweek)