Business

Internal Marketing

Bill Brelsford — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 15:32:00 GMT

I found this post about internal marketing over on TomPeters.com to be interesting and timely since the company that I work for will be having a meeting this friday to review our marketing plan.

Hey Hector.......

Bill Brelsford — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 15:26:00 GMT

I added a couple new links in my blog roll that you may be interested in.

It's fun to recognize local follks in the press

Bill Brelsford — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 14:32:00 GMT

This month I received my first issue of CMO magazine (subject = marketing). As I was flipping through the pages I noticed that one of the comments from a reader about one of the previous issue's articles. The comment was from John Jantsch, president of Duct Tape Marketing, a marketing firm in Kansas City. The company that I work for is a client of John's, in fact, he will be doing a presentation at our next company meeting. I am looking forward to hearing what he has to say and learning about the plan he is working on for our company.

What do your customers buy?

Bill Brelsford — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 04:29:00 GMT

I've been reading The Daily Drucker, a book of insights from management guru Peter Drucker. Yesterday's insight is titled “Understanding What the Customer Buys”. Managers often make the mistake of thinking that what they think of as quality is the value that customers buy. Drucker tells us that a customer never buys a product but rather the satisfaction of a want. Different customers (or groups of customers) will have different wants; figuring out the wants is so complicated it can only be answered by the customers themselves.

One area that comes to mind when considering the implication of this insight is sales (and yes, we are all in sales). I have often experienced, from both sides of the table, sales presentations where the sellers launch right into a presentation of their qualities and “special processes“ without spending time to discover the “want” that the customer needs satisfying.

So, what do your customers buy?

BTW - go buy the book.

Here comes China

Bill Brelsford — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 04:33:00 GMT

As I've mentioned before, I'm a big Tom Peters fan. Tom has been blogging about the goings on in China so when I saw that the latest issue of Business Week has a special report on China, I decided to pick it up. Here are some interesting (at least to me) tidbits and quotes from the article:

“What is stunning about China is that for the first time we have a huge, poor country that can compete both with very low wages and in high tech.“ - Richard B. Freeman

3Com has a switch manufactured in China - $183,000 list price. Cisco's comparable swith, $245,000 list

Bedroom furniture made in China has a list price 40% less than the comparable furniture made in the U.S. This list price (China) is often less than the cost of materials of the U.S. product.

$120 a month productions workers (that was per month)

$2,000 a month chip designers

350,000 new engineers a year

Think India was\is a big deal? Think it can't happen to your job? Think it's interesting that software development has been borrowing ideas from manufacturing (Lean, TOC, quality, etc.) and in many cases manufacturing can no longer compete?

May you live in interesting times........

Thou shalt dress for success (and assimilation)

Bill Brelsford — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 13:30:00 GMT

Found this great dress code via Don Box. Working for a company like this must be great. You don't have to wonder about how many times to chew your food, how to select your friends, how many minutes you can take off for a funeral, etc. All you have to do is look up the 50 page description in the manual and do what you are told. And I bet if you get to be a manager, you get to go to the most wonderful meetings.

Don't kill your design efforts

Bill Brelsford — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 13:36:00 GMT

Kim Goodwin of Cooper gives some great advice in her new article, “Ten Ways to Kill Design”. While this article is about successfully implementing interaction design in your company, the advice applies equally well to any new initiative or culture change you may want to implement in your company.

Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004

Bill Brelsford — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:29:00 GMT

This in not advice (etc, etc.), just my notes on the tax bill. There are other provisions related to this bill that I did not include here. You can download a copy of a more complete summary from the Kansas Society of Certified Public Accountants.

The President signed the Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004 on October 4th, 2004.

Provisions of the act that apply to individuals include:

A single definition of a child. Previously, there were several definitions of a qualifying child, depending upon the code section. If a child meets the new definition, the existing support and gross income tests do not apply. The new definition applies to:

the dependency exemption
the child credit
the earned income tax
the dependent care credit
head-of-household filing status

Various Tax Benefits extended through 2010

Marriage penalty relief
Expanded 10% income bracket
$1,000 child tax credit (15% refundability rate begins in 2004)

Changes to the way military families compute child and earned income credits

Extension of other provisions through 2005

The $250 deduction for teacher classroom expenses
Archer Medical Savings Acconts
Repeal of credit phase-out for electric and clean fuel vehicles
Allows nonrefundable tax credits against the AMT

In a note of how the world is changing due to terrorism, Congress broadened the disclosure authority to allow an individual's name, mailing address and social security number to be disclosed to enforcement agencies.

Tom Peters on managing lunch

Bill Brelsford — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 16:28:00 GMT

I'm a big Tom Peters fan. He's one of those guys that when I read his stuff I think, “ya, that's what I think too, I wish I could have said it as well”. Today Tom has a great blog entry about taking advantage of your lunch opportunities.