How to Get the Best Marketing Advice for Free

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Is there an elephant in your industry? There is usually at least one. They spend $100,000’s on branding, customer surveys, demographic analysis and focus groups. They spend even more on campaign analysis, testing and measuring to work out what works and what doesn’t. If you are a small guy, how can you compete with that?

Well you can. Just become a flea on the elephants back. That is what “Crazy John” Ilhan did. In retail, probably the most costly decision is your location. Go for a low cost location, and you get no traffic. If you go for a high cost location, and it is the wrong sort of traffic, you go out of business. Rather than spending a lot of money on geo-demographic surveys to identify customer shifts, he waited for Telstra or Optus to open a store in a new expanding area, and then open a store opposite and offered every passer-by lower prices.

By being a flea on the elephant’s back, he let the elephant take him to the fertile feeding locations they had spent large sums identifying.

So how might this work for your business? Perhaps you have a motor mechanics business with half a dozen staff. You don't see yourself in competition with BMW, and BMW certainly doesn’t see you as a competitor. You worry about the guy who is about the same size half a kilometre away. So you spend your time checking out what he is doing. This will probably result in a me too strategy, and ultimately the death spiral of a price war.

Alternatively, you could look in another direct. You could pay the same high price marketing company that BMW uses for advice, or you could get that advice for nothing. Drop in to the local BMW service centre and look around. See how clean their service area is. Check out their comfortable waiting rooms. Look at how their staff is presented. BMW spends millions on developing their image.

Now how difficult would it be to give your garage a lick of paint. Supply clean uniforms for your staff. Clean up your waiting room and put in today's paper and a coffee machine? How much do you think that would cost you? Probably $1-2000.

You are still not trying to compete with BMW, just to learn from them. When you start to apply these ideas to your business, the guy down the road won't even be in the game. You will probably even be able to lift your prices! Savvy marketing does not mean high cost marketing.

It is always the little things that make a difference, and you can get all this high price marketing advice for nothing by just opening your eyes and turning your head in the right direction.

May Your Business Be - As You Plan It.

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Defining Your Customers

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

An important part of any small business' marketing is understanding the nature of their customers. Are your customers Cats or Dogs?

May Your Business Be - As You Plan It.

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Never Forget Marketing 101

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

So Chicago lost the Olympics. What happened? Clearly there was a lot of backroom manoeuvring - offers made, deals done. Then the US President and his wife attended the final IOC pitch to seal the deal. What did they then do? They talked about what getting the deal would mean to them. This was particularly the case for Michelle Obama.

They both forgot rule 101 in Marketing.

It is not about you, it is about your buyer. It is about everyone’s favourite radio station WIIFM.
That is: What’s In It for Me?

Now probably the deal had been done with Rio well before the Obamas arrived in Copenhagen, so the final pitches were just for show and the aggrandisement of the IOC. If that is the case, the Chicago bidding team did not understand the bidding process. If the deal was already lost (and clearly comprehensively lost to be eliminated in the first round) they played their trump card for nothing, and in the end, humiliated the Obamas. Do you think Chicago will get any support for future bids or favours?

The Chicago bidding team were clearly not listening to the signals. They would have been there. You have to remember in any bidding process, the buyer will want the losers to stay in till the end, so they can extract the best deal from the winner, so they would be saying encouraging things even if they knew you had lost. Before they played their biggest ace, the bidding team should have known that they had the deal whether the Obamas were present or not, and their presence was just a payment of respect to the IOC for awarding them the bid.

It appeared, however, the Chicago bidding team must have really believed that great speeches by the Obamas would get Chicago over the line. If the speech was the thing that was going to change people’s mind and win the bid, it was the wrong speech. While the Obamas have a lot of goodwill in the international arena, the IOC still listens to WIIFM. Even the international general goodwill the Obamas have is based on WIIFM.

It is useful for small business owners to remember the lessons that too often the big guys forget. The same rules apply, no matter who you are.

May Your Business Be - As You Plan It.

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Advertising - Can We Live Without It?

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Imagine you walked into a supermarket, and you recognised almost none of the brands. There was aisle after aisle of goods to purchase, and you had to stop to read every single packet to see whether you would like this cereal or those biscuits.

This could only occur if you had not been exposed to any advertising before you walked into the supermarket. In our current world, of course, that is impossible, as we grow up with advertising around all around us, but yet this has happened to me.

I have encountered this situation a number of times when I have shopped in a supermarket in another country. I had no exposure to the local advertising and was confronted by a large variety of brands which were literally foreign to me. I was overwhelmed by choice. A simple buying decision, which might have only taken me a few minutes at my local supermarket while I located my favourite brands of particular categories, was greatly extended while I tried to determine which of these new brands would satisfy my needs.

Without the advertising, I did not know what the benefits of each brand were. I couldn’t find out the ingredients without lengthy label examinations. In a number of cases I just opted for the cheapest because I didn’t want to waste more time.

This is an interesting experiment you can try if you are travelling internationally, and you are looking after yourself, rather than just living in a hotel where everything is provided. I believe you cannot understand a country if you have not done your weekly shopping in one of its supermarkets.

Without advertising, there would be no range. Most products would become commodities with no points of difference. There would be only the most basic features. There would be no niche products for special needs. We would be unaware of all the benefits. Prices would probably be higher as there would be no competition.

So when your product is discovered on a store shelf, or on your website, can your buyers readily determine the benefits your product provides and for whom and your points of difference? Is your offer clear, and do you have a call to action? Ideally when they have found your product, they will have already been exposed to your advertising, so the final decision is quick and painless unlike the confusing frustrating ones I had to make without the benefit of advertising.

Enjoy this wonderful paean to Advertising – but a strong language warning at around second 6, after which all is ok and very funny.

May Your Business Be - As You Plan It.

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Working with Your Business Owner Friends

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

While driving around I heard a song on the radio from my youth. I didn’t truly understand it then, but I understand it more today. Although it was not written about business owners, it has a message for us.

The song is about how we need each others’ help to get what we need and want. In business, this means finding others of a like mind who we can work with. For large businesses regulatory competition issues come into play…. and lawyers. Two big businesses can’t combine and work together without getting a lot of unhelpful attention. There are just too many stakeholders – which is code for people who want to tell the business how it should be run for their benefit, but are not so interested in its success as to want to invest in it!

Take the alliance between Coles and Shell, and between Woolworths and Caltex, there have been a lot of complaints by ‘stakeholders’, although not from shareholders! The biggest losers from this arrangement have been the independent supermarkets and petrol stations. Some argue consumers may also have lost, but after scrutiny by the regulators and the government’s ill fated GroceryWatch and FuelWatch schemes, evidence of that has been very difficult to find.

In small business, because we aren’t changing the marketplace, we can be far more creative. You can exchange vouchers with as many business owners as you want to extend your reach. You can work on joint projects and events. You can advertise in each others’ newsletters.

You can create a referral ring. A classic example of that is the wedding mafia. This often consists of a photographer, a printer, a florist, a venue, and an event planner. If any one of them gets a wedding, they all do! This type of arrangement could quadruple a small business’ reach, which is very difficult for big businesses to do in the same way.

These strategies are the most powerful ones available for small businesses. They cost little to organise, although they will take time to find the right partners and time to plan.

Remember a small business owner is never alone and when they work with other owners, they are far more likely to achieve the success they desire.

To be successful in business, all you need is a little help from your business owner friends.

(OK I admit it, this is just a thinly veiled reason for me to post a song that brings back happy memories. Enjoy.)



What do you think? Remember, the best commenters this month will receive a $500 printer.

May Your Business Be - As You Plan It.

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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How One Business Spends 50 cents to Make $100

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

The best earning marketing dollars are spent on your customers rather on advertising where the money goes to some media mogul. Consider this example:

Coles is currently offering to pay the GST on feminine hygiene products under the banner “Why should you be taxed for being a Woman”. Why are they doing this and will it work?

This is a fairly emotional appeal, but as a male I can be objective on this (he says quickly ducking to avoid sharp objects being propelled at him by the females in his life).

Clearly many women feel this is an unjust tax. It was very controversial when first introduced, although the then opposition and now government has done nothing to remove it.

Firstly, by raising this issue, Coles gets far wider coverage than their advertising would otherwise reach. It becomes a topic for talkback radio and newsletters like this.

Secondly, the actual cost for Coles on a typical product of value around $5 will be 50 cents. Given the tight margins in supermarkets, this might be most if not all the gross profit on the item.

Thirdly, it is most unlikely that a woman will visit Coles to buy these products only and go somewhere else to do her weekly shopping. In fact she is likely to get her $100 weekly groceries at the same time as the purchase of these products.

Finally, would someone change where they do their weekly $100 grocery shopping for just 50 cents? If the 50 cents off had been for razor blades or Cornflakes it would just be seen as another special, easily ignored, but in this case, Coles are appealing to women’s feeling of injustice, and some might just change to support the principle.

Will it work? As in all these strategies there is only one way to find out.

Can you think of a way of spending money on your customers to get them to try you?

Will you convert to Coles, or do you just see this as cynical manipulation?

What do you think? Remember, the best commenters this month will receive a $500 printer.

May Your Business Be - As You Plan It.

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Are Your Customers Cats or Dogs?

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Our dog is not particularly active, suffering as he does from a touch of arthritis, but he loves his food. If you give him fillet steak, or just plain dog food from the can, he eats it with equal gusto. He will eat what our cat doesn’t finish from her bowl. In fact if she throws any of it up, he will eat that too. He is just not that fussy. In fact the only thing we have found he won’t eat is brussels sprouts. (I can’t say that I can blame him.)

Our cat on the other hand is quite fussy. She is rather partial to mince topside- and won’t eat cheap cat food. It has to be the type of food you get from those small containers which are twice the cost of the larger cheap brands. If you put out something she regards as inferior, she will leave it… for our dog. She would never go near the dog’s bowl.

So what are your customers like? Are they cats or dogs? Are they only interested in the premium cuts, or couldn’t tell the difference between topside and reprocessed meat.

The problem many business owners create for themselves is trying to sell a service that only felines will appreciate and pay for to their canine clients and then are upset when they focus on price. There is nothing wrong with having canines as clients, but they will not appreciate and pay for topside.

If you have canine clients (and there are a lot more of them than the felines) make sure that your service is designed to meet their needs rather than your ego.

You can of course have both feline and canine clients but make sure the message you present to each does not confuse.

When you understand if your clients are dogs or cats, you will know what food they will appreciate and pay for and be able to keep them happy and faithful for many years.



All you need to do now is to Empower yourself and take action ...

May Your Business Be - As You Plan It.

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Best Salesperson in Your Business

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

A common myth in which many small business owners believe is that all they need to do is find a great salesperson to be successful. They already know how to make great widgets, and they are really good at providing their service to their clients, but if they just had someone who is good at door-to-door to bring in new customers, their business would be brilliant!

The problem is to find great salespeople. On average, most sales people are average. By definition, half are below average! You can, of course train a new sales person, but if you are not great at sales, it will be the blind leading the blind.

You may find a great salesperson – they certainly exist. A great salesperson may be good at selling lots of things, but the thing they are best at selling is themselves. They know their value. They know the value of the business they generate.

Unfortunately, many business owners truly don’t understand the value of great salespeople and will not pay for the best. They are expensive. They like to have uncapped commissions. They will probably be the most expensive people in the business. They will also most likely leave you when they realise you need them more than they need you. The really great salespeople work for themselves. The ones that stay are the average ones.

Large businesses with many sales staff know that they must continually invest in sales training and have sales managers to drive performance in an effort to keep them above average. In contrast, small businesses try to hire salespeople with these skills already in place. They try to get them on the cheap. Only the average ones are cheap.

For any business that has been around a number of years, the owner will have developed some sales skills. They are also likely to be the best salesperson in their business. This is as you would expect, as they have the greatest incentive. The profit goes to them. They are also responsible for the training and support of any sales staff, whose skills and motivation will almost certainly be less.

However, some business owners truly dislike the sales process. They would like to be left alone to build their widgets with someone else providing the customers. The only way that they can do this is if they get a job working for another widget maker.

Business owners need to make the choice on whether they want to stay in love with widget making, or fall in love with owning a widget business.

Marketing and sales is part of every business and the owner must take a lead in these areas. This is what differentiates the owner from the employee that just makes widgets.The owner must be prepared to be the best in marketing and sales so they can lead their sales team. This means investing in education and training for themselves if they are unsatisfied with their existing sales results.

In small business, the best salesperson must be the owner. It’s their business. If they can’t sell it to others, who else can?

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Discount Price Wars

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

When competition is stiff or times are tough, and businesses experience a slump in sales, the natural response of business owners is to reduce their prices. In response to this, they find their competition starts to do the same, and before you know it, you are in a price war.

Price wars are like trench warfare. You may gain a few meters in territory here, whilst the other side gains a few meters from you around your flank. And both sides incur large losses. In this type of battle, it is a war of attrition, and the last person standing wins while bleeding red ink. They also inherit a decimated market landscape with their buyers educated to expect discounts.
A number of negative impacts occur to your business when you discount. The most obvious one is the loss in margin, which you hope to make up with increased sales. In most cases, this does not happen.

The next problem that may occur is that you get a reputation as a discounter, with potential customers waiting for your sales times, particularly if they are seasonal. (I like to buy a new car when dealers are trying to get rid of their last year models from their stock. Major savings are to be had at such times and they are much more willing to negotiate.)

Discounting may also confuse your message to your best buyers, especially if you are attempting to appeal to an up market clientele who are price insensitive. An example of this is the upmarket department store David Jones who when they want to shift old stock, they somewhat snootily declare “As you know David Jones do not have sales, but next month is our annual clearance.” Clearly they do not want to be known to their up market clientele as discounters, but they still want to move their old stock.

Finally, after you finish discounting, how do you lift your prices again? If someone comes in after your sale has finished, and asks you to give him the same 25% discount offer this week as you had last week, it is hard to justify a negative response unless…. you have a clear reason for the sale in the first place. In the case of car dealers, it is to make way for the new model, even if the only difference is a cosmetic facelift. For retailers, it is selling off the last of their summer range before winter.

So if you are discounting, you must have a reason other rather than you are not making as much money as you used to. The reason must be transparent and short term so as not to damage your relationship with your best buyers. Your discounting may indeed attract more buyers, but many may be price shoppers who will not stay loyal to you when your prices do eventually return to normal. These people will be off finding bargains elsewhere, and in the meantime you may have damaged your brand in the eyes of your best buyers.

Most people lose money when they discount. Learn How to Discount Your Way to Higher Profits, by subscribing to The Small Business Achiever. Also in this month’s issue:

• How to Track Your Profits So You Can Drive Them Higher
• Which Online Directories should You Use to Boost Your Google Rankings?

The Small Business Achiever – Business Owner Brief is Your Shortcut to Success and Your Unfair Business Advantage.

May Your Business Be – As You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Increase Your Prices by Packaging Value

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

In any buying decision, this is question that must be answered by the buyer: “Is the product or service worth it?” Or more generally, is the offer made by the seller is equal to the dollars that they are asking for it.

Let’s take a simple example, water. If you wanted a drink of water, and you went to a pub, and they served you water from a tap, what would you expect to pay? It would probably be free. If you went to a kiosk, you could buy bottled ‘mineral water’ in a basic plastic bottle, and it might be $2-3.

If you were at a boutique restaurant, you might be able to get water from the Greenland icecap, presented in a special designer bottle with a stunning label, a bottle that you would like to take home as a souvenir. It might cost you $87.

It is still just water. Only a chemist, with certainty, could tell the difference between the three by measuring the levels of trace minerals in them, (although the tap water may be obvious if it has a lot of chlorine in it).

Is the water from Greenland worth it? Sure there is cost to get it from Greenland to the restaurant in Australia, but the cost of the water, the packaging and delivery might be $10 with bulk production, compared with $0.50 for the bottled Australian mineral water production and delivery. You also have to pay for the restaurant’s overheads, but they usually provide water free anyway. Even if you could you really tell the difference between this water and the water from an Australian mineral spring, how can it be worth $85 more?

So why would people pay for $87 for a bottle of the Greenland icecap water? This water could not even be considered rare, since the Greenland icecaps are 3km thick and contain enough water to raise global sea levels by 100m, but it is novel and ties into the quest by some people for the natural and unusual. It would be for the ‘experience’. To be able to say that they have tasted it to their friends. They have the beautiful bottle on display at home as proof and an opportunity to recount the experience to whomever will listen. Perhaps to impress their guests. There may have been other reasons, but I bet it wasn’t because they were thirsty.

Do you think they would have paid $87 for the water if it came out of the restaurant’s kitchen in a plastic cup? Of course the waiter would have treated opening this bottle in the same way as an expensive bottle of wine, and it would be served in beautiful crystal water glasses. The waiter would have poured it reverently, stepped back while you tasted it, and nodded your satisfaction. In this process, the waiter is acknowledging your good taste and sophistication. This would have all been part of the experience— and the packaging!

While packaging is one of the most common ways to increase prices of a product, it also applies to services. You can either sell your time by the hour or package it and sell the value of your service, at a higher rate. To do this however, you must change your service so it can be offered as a package.

[This is an excerpt from Issue 106 of the Small Business Achiever – Business Owner Brief where strategies for packing your products and services are explained in detail. The Small Business Achiever is your Unfair Business Advantage, where all the steps are revealed.]

May Your Business Be – As You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Small Business Marketing in a Downturn

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

With all the bad news on TV, everyone is looking at tightening their belts. There is nothing wrong with that, as during the good times, we can all get a little bit flabby.

So is marketing a place where you should start the cutting?

It depends.

If your marketing is working, it will be generating 10 or 20 times its cost in bringing in new business and getting repeat customers. If that is the case for your business, why would you cut it? So the first thing to look at is whether it is working. If it is not, of course you should stop it, but you should do this anyway.

If it is working, should you keep it going unchanged?

It depends.

A recession may mean that your target market is buying less, or even buying differently. While it may still pay for itself, it may be less effective. It is possible that these changes create opportunities for you. By monitoring your marketing results and talking to your customers, you can identify these opportunities.

What often happens in a recession is a buyer who usually will take a premium offer will be more interested in a mid-level offer, and those usually focused on that level, will consider more budget offerings. This does not mean you should discount. A better strategy is to create offers that appeal more to this price sensitivity whilst maintaining your margins.

Look at the downturn as an opportunity to do the housecleaning in your business that you have been putting off because you have been too busy. It is also a good time to work ON your business, to not only bulletproof it against harder times, but also because it is something you should be doing ALL the time.

If all around you are slashing and burning, measured pruning, and focused marketing will allow you to continue to grow by taking your competitor’s share in a weakening market without following them downmarket with discounting. This, of course, does not mean that you should not take advantage of the discounts offered by your suppliers who have no other strategy!

Don’t follow lemmings. If you want different results to those of your competitors, you must do different things, and be different. Do a stocktake on your business today, and plan for where you want to be in the future.

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs …….Yours is the earth” Rudyard Kipling

If you are unsure how to do this, please use this complimentary Mission Statement Tool.

Your action plan:

• Take some time out,
• Trim the fat,
• Eliminate marketing that isn’t working for you, and
• Use the opportunities create with the new environment.

"In the midst of difficulty lies opportunity" Albert Einstein

May Your Business Be – As You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Buying and Selling on Price

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

All businesses should endeavour to create points of differences for their product or service, but what about if you are selling an undifferentiated product, something that is truly a commodity, such as petrol or even bottles of Coca Cola (which of itself is not a commodity, but you will get exactly the same product whether it’s from a milk bar or supermarket, here or across the country). Businesses that sell commodity products tend to sell with price as a point of difference.

There are two things that influence this:

• geographical location (convenience and cost of supply), and
• buyer knowledge of the market place.

Taking the first point, geography, this is about how far you are prepared to chase a bargain. You might drive across town to save $100 on a refrigerator, but would you do the same for a $1 saving on a six pack of Coke? Probably not. Economists call this the cost of shoe leather- this distance and effort you would give in time and money to achieve that saving.

What does this mean for your business? When setting commodity pricing, you only need to survey your competitors in your ‘economic’ neighbourhood.

The second factor influencing this is the buyer knowledge of your price difference. If they don’t know about it, they will not find you and may pay more than they should. This is why petrol stations have massive signs proclaiming their prices. Which brings me to the latest government efforts to increase consumer knowledge of prices. Will this really help small business and give lower prices to consumers?

First of all there is FuelWatch currently only operating in WA. Most motorists when they are low on fuel, like to fill up while they are already in their car on some other errand, rather than make a special trip. Generally this means they may pass half a dozen petrol stations (depending on the length of the trip) and will be able to see variations in price on station signage, and would be able to determine a good price for that part of their city at the time they are wishing to fill.

Service stations are highly competitive changing their prices several times a day. Can you think of any other product where that happens? The station owner will opportunistically drop their prices if their sales are low, and increase them when it is high. This is exactly how a good market should operate. By enforcing the price changes once per day, the motorist will be the loser. I would also expect that the independents will lose, as they are the most nimble. This will ultimately see a loss of competition- the opposite of what the government is trying to achieve.

The other scheme introduced by the government is GroceryChoice. In this scheme, the results that are reported are a month old, while grocery prices change at least weekly. (At least FuelWatch reported daily.) Also the baskets used are not transparent, so you have no idea whether this represents what you would buy. So consumers will ignore this, and still look to newspapers to see where the best prices are every week.

At one level, you might argue that this is a largely harmless waste of taxpayer funds, but there is a more ominous side. While people will not use this site much, when they do it will re-enforce the supermarket duopoly between Coles and Woolworths (Safeway). These two chains monitor their competition’s prices very closely. The website results prove this with only cents different between the two.

Where there is a significant difference is between the big chains and the independents whose prices are higher. Now there will be independents that are cheaper for some things than the big two, but because there are so many of them, the government has lumped them all together. However, from the consumer perspective, it ‘proves’ that they are cheaper than the independents. No wonder Coles and Woolworths love this! Once again, by interfering in the market, the government will drive the independents out and lessen competition, resulting in higher prices.

If businesses are selling commodities, and selling on price, advertising that fact is important, but when governments involve themselves in the marketplace to fix something that is not broken, casualties are inevitable and ultimately consumers and small business owners are the losers.

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Segmenting Your Market’s Mind

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

One very well known marketing strategy is to segment your market and provide different offers to each segment specially targeted to that segment. If you were Ticketmaster, you might send information on the new opera season to the older segment of your database, and information on touring pop groups to the under 30’s. (Of course there are people under 30 who like opera, but when you want to get the most for your advertising buck, you go where the numbers are.)

Segmenting your market by age, gender, geography, income etc is done all the time by good marketers, but what if you could segment your market by the way they think? How powerful would that be? Saab have done just that. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a link to this novel online ad which is currently showing in the Faifax media, as they rotate their ads, but I will describe it so you will recognise it.

Have you seen the spinning ballerina test? See an example here. It is a rotating image which can be used to tell if your left brain or right brain dominates your thinking. Psychologists tell us that the person who is left brained tends to be more logical, methodical and organised. The right brainers, on the other hand, tend to be driven more by instinct and emotion and are more creative. They also say if you see the lady rotate anticlockwise, you are left brained, clockwise, you are right brained.

So back to the ad, which starts off with this rotating lady. It asks you to see which way the lady rotates for you and then asks you to select the appropriate button. You then get taken to a Saab ad in which the copy is tailored to whether you are left or right brained. If you are left brained, it tells you how many horsepower the car has and how fast it will accelerate and gives you details on the dimensions. If you are right brained, it explains the experience of power and the thrill you get with the acceleration, and the luxurious feel and comfort that the car gives you.

So Saab has created an ad which has been crafted for the way you think and you select the ad that is most likely to be a selling success for you!

For the record, I have seen the lady spin both ways.

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Use Your Points of Difference to Stand Out

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

One of the biggest problems we all have in small business is standing out. Almost everyone has competitors of some description. It could be the person down the road that promises to undercut whatever price you offer. It could be the elephant in your marketplace- for example, if you are a small telco, the elephant is Telstra.

Or your competition could be a myriad of me-too suppliers in highly competitive marketplaces all driving the prices down to the point where no-one makes any money.

So how do you stand out from all this competition? You make sure your business is different in some way to all your competition, and you make sure potential customers who value that difference, and will pay more for it, know about it. The first step in differentiating your business from everyone else’s is to answer the question:

Why Should I Buy from You?

Can you answer this question? You must have an answer. If you don’t know, you customers certainly won’t, and you will find you are just competing on price and barely surviving.

The answers to the question: “Why should I Buy from You?” are your Points of Difference (POD). This is arguably the most important marketing strategy to get under your belt. In marketing speak it is also called your Unique Selling Proposition or USP. What this means is that you are defining why your product or service is different to everyone one of your competitors. When you have your USP, you actually have no competitors, because your offer is unique.

Great in theory, but just a word of warning. This also means that your product cannot be considered universal any more, and your USP will appeal to a more narrow group of customers, or a Niche.

So what does this mean in practice? You might be the cheapest. This will, of course, attract a lot more business, which will compensate for your lower margins. However, this will not appeal to everyone. Lowest cost, usually means no frills. Jetstar is a no-frills airline, but Qantas still has lots of passengers who want the extras, and are prepared to pay for it. So Qantas and Jetstar promote themselves to different audiences.

Maybe you said your Point of Difference was the quality of your service. I am now going to say something that may shock you:

Quality of service is not a good enough reason for people to buy from you.

Everyone says they have quality service. Have you ever heard anyone say: “Buy from me, my service is lousy?” Quality is a given, a pre-requisite today. Everyone says they offer a quality service. So what’s the answer? Surely ‘quality’ counts for something?

Regular subscribers to the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief will already know who their competitors are. In Issue 101 – where this full article is published, subscribers learned how to create Points of Difference for their business.

In Issue 103 of the Small Business Achiever I explain how these points of difference can be used o the fundamentals of how to increase your prices with your Points of Difference can be used in your ads and on your website.

In Issue 103 of the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief find out:

The Anatomy of Ads that Sell

Creating a Structure that will Drive Your Business Growth

Designing a Website that Generates Leads for Your Business

Get step-by-step advice that will improve your business every month.

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Why You Should Increase Your Prices & Why Most Owners Won’t

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Before I answer this, try answering the following question:

Why are You in Business?

People give all sorts of reasons. Often they refer to some higher purpose, such as helping people in some way or providing for some personal lifestyle needs. This is all very well and good, but all these objectives will be compromised if the one overriding purpose of any business is not met- that is to make a profit!

Why is making a profit so important? If you are not making a profit, you are just breaking even, or more likely, making a loss. (Even when owners believe they are making a profit, they often aren’t as they have not considered the sustainability of their business.)

If your business is losing money, your energies and resources for any other purpose will be drained. You can’t continue helping people if you are going out of business. Likewise, if your lifestyle business is making a loss, it won’t be a very happy lifestyle. So if your business is unprofitable, the chances are very small that you will achieve other objectives through your business.

So let’s agree that making a profit is the prime purpose of your business. What then are your options to make your business more profitable? You can:

1. Reduce your Costs
2. Increase your Sales

Pretty basic really. Lets look at the first – decreasing costs. This is a limited strategy as at some point, you will compromise your sales. Whereas, increasing your sales is a no limit strategy.
There are five strategies you can use to increase your sales. These are the Five Turnover Drivers:

• Increasing Enquiries
• Increasing Conversions to Sales
• Increasing the Average Value per Sale
• Increasing the Number of Times Someone Buys from You, and
• Increasing Your Prices

Good businesses will focus on all five turnover drivers, but the one most find hardest to implement is to increase their prices. Let’s look at why people don’t increase their prices.
When setting prices, businesses look at what their competitors are charging. If they charge too much, they know they will lose business because their competitors are cheaper. But…

Are these businesses really your competition?

Regular subscribers to the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief will already know who their competitors are. (Issue 101 – Standing Out with Your Points of Difference). If the people who you are comparing yourself with are not your true competitors, why should they influence your prices?

In Issue 102 of the Small Business Achiever I explain the fundamentals of how to increase your prices so that the fear of business loss will no longer trap you in the price taker role in which most businesses languish. In fact, this strategy will transform your business!

In Issue 102 of the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief find out:

The Easiest Way to Increase Your Prices

How to Start Getting Your Business Organised

Being Found on the Internet - Paid vs 'Free' Search

Get step-by-step advice that will improve your business every month.

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Your Marketing Investment

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

When we look at our monthly accounts in our business, we check our sales, gross profits, and then our overheads before we come to our bottom line. In our drive to increase the bottom line results we often focus on our costs, to see how we can reduce them.

We check to see if we can get our phone costs down, can we get cheaper printing, can we find low cost contractors that do what our high price ones do now? All this is good business practice, ensuring that our hard earned gross profit is not lost in overhead blow-outs.

Finally, we get to our marketing line in the overheads. This could be advertising. It could be your website, promotional products or networking organisations costs.

Marketing budgets of 5-10% of sales are not at all unusual. However, there is a temptation to treat them the same way as your other costs. If profits are being squeezed, it is often the first area to get slashed, but marketing costs are different to other costs.

The purpose of your non-marketing costs is to produce the products and deliver your services to your customers. If you can reduce these costs without affecting your sales, that is increase your productivity, you should definitely do that, and see your profits increase.

If your marketing is working, and you reduce these costs, you will, instead, reduce your sales and your profits. Marketing is an investment which should be giving you a high return. Before you start reducing your marketing spend, you need to do some analysis.

• Look at how many customers your ads produce. What is the cost per lead, and cost per sale of your advertising?
• Do your thank you gifts generate repeat business and referrals?
• What business has your networking produced for you?

For each of your marketing activities, you must have a way of measuring results. You may find that some of your advertising works better than others. You have an opportunity either to improve the performance of the poorer advertising, perhaps by getting a copywriter, or dropping it and spending more where the advertising is working.

If the marketing is generating a healthy return, why would you try to save money by reducing it? If you cut successful marketing your sales loss will be larger than the cost saving. By all means, retire unsuccessful marketing that is not recovering its costs, but seek to replace it with higher return marketing.

How do you choose where to spend your marketing dollar? The answer is to test and measure everything. Only when you do that can you truly decide which of your marketing is a cost, and which is an investment.

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

One Hundred Year Old Marketing Lesson

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

There was a recent article about a book on Alexander Graham Bell and whether he really did invent the telephone. The debate still rages on, but there is certainly no question about who was the better marketer.

Bell’s major competitor was Elisha Gray. Why do we remember Bell and not Gray?

One reason is simply that Bell, not Gray, actually demonstrated a phone that transmitted speech. Gray was focused instead on his era's pressing communications challenge: how to send multiple messages simultaneously over the same telegraph wire. As Gray huffed to his attorney, "I should like to see Bell do that with his apparatus."

Not to denigrate Gray’s achievement, but how many people do you think would have been more interested in the 19th Century in transmitting voice, than in multiple messages over a telegraph wire? The later technology would have enabled an increase in the efficiency of Morse Code transmission a severely limiting communications technology controlled by the nerds of the day.

Bell, on the other hand was producing a technology with an appeal to the mass market. It was easy to understand, and its benefits were very clear, given the obvious consumer problems with Morse Code.

The technological winner was always going to be the one that end consumer would find easiest to use. The expense of the initial telephones was of course high, but tumbled in price once a tipping point in uptake was achieved.

This lesson from a hundred years ago is still relevant today. When creating a new product or service, there are often different ways it can be presented to your marketplace. There is a huge difference between what you and the other nerds ‘know’ that your market needs, and what it actually wants. Once you have given them what they want, you can sell them what they need.

Bell produced a technology that the market wanted. Once utilisation picked up, there was a need for Gray’s multiplexing technology- to fit more conversations down the one wire, an economic driver, but at the same time there was also consumer demand for private lines rather than the line sharing of the original telephones. Again, consumer driven technology.

Solutions driven by consumer demand will always be easier to market than those of expert perceived consumer need requiring consumer education, usually something at which experts are very poor.

When introducing to market something that is new, an appeal to want rather than need is always going to be more successful.

May Your Business in 2008 be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Selling a Business

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

The real test of business success is to see the value others place on your business. That is, how much they are prepared to pay you to own it. However, few owners see the return on their money and time spent building their business when they try to sell it.

Someone buying a business has similar considerations to someone buying a home. If the home is new or well maintained, and little expenditure is necessary to make it they way they want before moving in, the buyer will pay more. If the house is run down, and requires substantial renovation, they will insist on paying much less. Taking the analogy further, if buying a vacant block, they will have to also budget for the house to be built.

When buying a business, the comparison is between taking over a going concern, building up a run down business or starting a new business from scratch. Buyers will consider the saving in time and effort through buying a going concern that provides predictable incomes and operates smoothly when compared with one that has been managed poorly, or the effort of creating a new business.

Unfortunately, most businesses are totally dependent on their owners. When they aren’t there, nothing happens or sales drop. When a buyer looks at such a business, they will value it on its physical assets and its existing customer base. The value of the customer base may be heavily discounted if it is believed that the customers have a strong personal connection with the owner. Little or no value will be placed on the future growth potential of the business as the owner has basically done nothing to tap it. Why should a buyer pay for value that the current owner has missed. The buyer must put in the effort to unlock that potential and take all the risk if they are to be a success. They will also discount the value where it is possible key staff may leave soon after the existing owner. If there are no systems, all they are really buying is a customer list of dubious value, plus a few used assets.

Compare how a buyer values a well managed business. Along with the assets and the existing customer value, the buyer will see a marketing system which has allowed the existing owner to grow their business. They may see year on year growth in sales and profit. They will see systems in all areas of the business so if staff leave, they can bring in new staff and train them to run the business in the same way. The buyer in this case may pay 3 or 4 or even more times the annual profit of the business in addition to its other assets. (Highly successful listed companies sell for 20 times their annual earnings or more).

The difference between these two scenarios is business systems that ensure that the business runs smoothly, that there is a marketing strategy that provides predictable sales growth and systems that manage the people within the business. These systems make the success of the business independent of ownership. Whenever risk is reduced, price can be increased. The time to put in these systems is not when you are trying to sell the business. You can’t fatten a pig on market day, as one politician is regularly quoted as saying. These systems should be put in place now. They are part of your Exit Strategy.

The best time to prepare your exit strategy is when you start your business, but it is never too late.

Find out more about these strategies at:

The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success

This book, which has a forward from Tony Steven, the CEO of COSBOA, the peak small business organisation in Australia, comes with a $100 of business tools, and provides an easy to understand, step-by-step approach on how to improve your business, starting with your goals, right through to systems and sales.



Please visit Five Pillars for more information on “The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success”

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

The First Marketer I Ever Met

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

I don’t remember his name, but I remember what he wore.

As a young engineer, a few years out of university, I was the stereotypical technician. I thought everyone who was not technical was a bean counter. That the technicians created the real value.

And then I saw my first Marketer.

I had been forced, along with a number of my colleagues to attend some management training. Almost dragged from my computer. These were the days when only engineers had computers (or terminals linked to a super computer).

There were other speakers at the conference, but I only remember the marketer. He wore a dark purple suit (these were the early eighties). He had a cream shirt with a purple tie, and even purple shoes. When he sat down in, as it happened, a matching purple upholstered chair, we could see his purple socks.

He was the Marketing Director of ACI Industries, supplying among other things, domestic insulation batts. These were basically a commodity item. Whoever you bought them from, they all had insulation ratings. Rated by the CSIRO. For domestic use. And once they were in, you never saw them again. Not a very exciting consumer product to market.

He was quietly spoken and gradually told his tail. About the state of the market when he had started. About a business that was going nowhere. It was a case of trench warefare amongst the main competitors, where, like in the first world war in France, territory gains were measured in feet and inches. In the insulation game, it a percentage point of market share gain here, and losses somewhere else. No side had any technical edge. It was a war of attrition. It was only a question of who had the greatest stamina for losses, and would leave the battlefield first.

Now the Marketing guy had gone over to the US to see what the marketers over there were doing to market insulation batts. And at one time, he even visited a manufacturing plant. And while he was there, he saw every so often, instead of a standard yellow batt on the production line, a pink one. He asked the supervisor, about the pink batts. And he told him, these batts were seconds that had not passed the quality inspection, and were died pink so that the packagers would know to discard them.

When he returned to Australia he asked the ACI Operations Manager to dye all the batts pink, and created a marketing campaign that implied that the pink batts were superior to the yellow ones (but in such a way that could not be challenged- since technically, all batts rated the same performed the same).

But the pink batts became a brand. Not only did ACI’s sales greatly increase, but even when customers called ACI’s competitors, they asked for pink batts. To which they replied: “No Sir/Madam, our batts are yellow and perform just as well as the pink ones.” They knew they were in trouble, and started their own advertising campaigns.

But it was too little too late. And yellow was such a boring colour- even if you didn’t see them when they were installed.

ACI became the market leader. They had taken a commodity product where the competition was basically price driven. They had created a brand, and a point of difference. There was also a fun element to the campaign. (Pink is more fun than Yellow. And who do you think this colour difference influenced most?)

After all these years, they are still at it (although they have changed the name).

And there it was. Someone had created value for a business, not through technical innovation, but by marketing innovation. My transition from the technical world started shortly thereafter.

As for the Mareketer- I never saw him again.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is a Business Coach and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems.

The Australian Small Business Blog

The Two Key Differences Between a Business & a Job

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Many people work for themselves. They could be professionals, trades, consultants or a contractor providing a service. They could be one person organisations, or have 3 or 4 staff. But are these organisations really a business?

There are two key criteria to determine whether they own a business or a job.

1. Can their Business Survive without them?

Take the solo consultant as an extreme case. They are paid by the hour to perform work for others. Often they work for just a small group of clients. At times they can be very busy. But what happens when they are sick? Or when they want to take time off? The income stops.

Or the business could have half a dozen staff. But when the owner is away, sales fall off, or dry up completely. The business is still dependent on the owner.

In both cases, the owner owns a job. Not a business. No-one would pay anything for this business. The clients the owner has would be his personal clients, and probably would leave when the owner leaves.

When the company continues to make money even when the owner is away, and operates as if they were still there, then it becomes a valuable asset.

To make your business survive without you, it is necessary to bring systems into the business so that you can give away anything that is not Brain Surgery to someone else. You have to learn to leverage yourself.

2. Who does the Marketing?

I have heard owners say to me: “We provide a really good service, and I am not interested in the marketing. I just want to find someone to do the marketing for us, and we will provide the service.” That is, they are seeking to outsource marketing.

If someone else is doing the marketing for you, they could equally direct the business they generate to someone else. And those you work for are not your clients, they belong to the people who found them for you. You are effectively just a subcontractor. The marketer takes their cut, and you get the rest.

If you join a franchise that provides all the leads to you, when you leave, they keep the customer. This is not a business, it is a job. Someone will replace you when you go.

And if you rely on 1 or 2 sources of work for your business, you are depending on a relationship that may not survive a personnel change in the customer organisation. Like a job that has finished.

The second big difference between a job and a business, is the marketing. It is the marketing that creates the business. If someone else does the marketing, they have the business and you are working for them. In a job.

So take charge of your marketing, don’t leave it to chance, or worse, give it to someone else to do. It is part of your Brain Surgery. Which is why some businesses are purely Marketers outsourcing their whole service delivery. And who do you think makes the money?

So leverage yourself as much as possible, but never give away your marketing.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is a Business Coach and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems.

The Australian Small Business Blog

At What Price?

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

When marketing a product or service, businesses find it difficult to set their prices. Too high, and no-one will buy, too low, everyone will buy, but you will go broke. So how do you set your prices?

The basic principle of pricing is that you should set your prices as high as the market will allow. But what does that mean? (You may not decide to do this for other marketing reasons such as trying to buy customers, or offering an introductory price to encourage people to try a new product or service. But this should be a conscious strategic decision.)

When setting their prices, the single biggest mistake that businesses make is not to understand the value they offer compared with their competitors. So you must understand why your product is better than everyone else’s.

Is it stronger? Does it last longer? Is it better designed? Does it look better? If it is a service, what are the superior results you provide? What is the value of such differences to the buyer?

If it is a commodity, then what else are you offering? For example, you can get a $2 chocolate snack bar at the service station as you are filling your car. You know you could probably get the exact same bar for 25% less at the supermarket, but you will have to make a special stop, and then you will have to wait in a queue. Its just not worth the 50 cents you will save. You are prepared to pay 50 cents for the convenience of buying the bar now. But if the bar was $5, would you buy it? Well you might if you knew that this service station was the only retail store for 200 miles!

Economists call this decision making “the cost of shoe leather” which is the amount of effort you are prepared to make to find a saving on your purchase.

When you understand the value of what you provide compared with your competitors, and that includes substitutes for your product or service, you can then better set your prices.

So if you product lasts twice as long, could you charge twice as much? Well consider the inconvenience factor of the replacement. If the item was socks, the inconvenience factor might be quite low. But if it was a special valve inside a jet engine, the replacement cost of which was many times the value of the valve, you could probably charge considerably more for the valve than twice the cost of a valve that lasts half as long, particularly if you guaranteed its lifetime.

So the value of the product has little to do with the cost of production or service. It is the value of the product to the buyer. But it is not enough for you to know the value of the product or service to the buyer. The buyer has to know as well. But it is surprising how often that a buyer really doesn’t understand the full value of what they may be buying.

If the buyer does not understand the value of what they are buying, they won’t pay what it is worth. If they don’t know there is not another retail store for 200 miles, they are unlikely to pay $5 for that snack bar. And the jet engine manufacturer may not understand the maintenance cost implications of a lower quality valve to the end user.

When you know what your product is truly worth, and you have educated the buyer of its value, you will be able to set prices that reflect that value.

If you don’t understand your value, you will forever be just another commodity seller competing on price.

If you would like to post a comment on this article, please click on the Comments link below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is a Business Coach and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems.

The Australian Small Business Blog