Great Web Entrepreneurs – It’s All about the Consumer
Published May 9, 2011 | 
Remember It’s All about the Consumer
Your business is not about any of the products or services that you sell, is not about the prices that you have researched and plan to apply to your goods and services, and is not about any of your competition and the tactics you have developed to beat them. Your business is all about the consumers in the market including your customers, or clients, period.
In spite of everything you do, your customers are the people that will in the end decide if your business goes boom, bust or just fizzles. 
You should therefore develop the clear understanding that everything you do in business must be focused on the customer, including but not limited to your policies, warranties, payment options, operating hours, presentations, advertising and promotional campaigns, website and social media.
At the end of the day it is vital to the success of your business that you know who your customers are and everything about them, inside out and upside down.
It’s All about the Consumer that Drives the Global Economy
This century the focus is all about the consumer. Let’s examine Dell, everyone’s favorite example of the modern supply chain best practices, and how it has built a $40 billion business that is fundamentally products that are make-to-order. On close examination, the Dell Business Model is exactly opposite of the 1920s era Ford Motor Co.
Demand from the customer drives a highly-developed network of 25 strategic suppliers that together represent 75 percent to 80 percent of “total spending” and provide 80 percent of the “Technology R&D” effort that delivers new product to market. Dell’s finely tuned business model manages to ship 20 million products per quarter with only three days’ of inventory. Understand that inventory in this model is actually viewed as a liability (0.6 percent component price declines per week), not an asset.
The business is based on three high-level performance metrics: (1) growth, (2) profitability, and (3) liquidity. The first two have always measured consumer value, while the third measures Dell’s independence from physical assets. Believe it or not, it’s a perfect business dashboard for the new millennium. Dell is simply the world’s very best-known example of a demand-driven supply network (DDSN).
A demand-driven supply network (DDSN) is clearly defined as a system of technologies and processes that senses and reacts to real-time demand across a network of customers, suppliers, and employees. The key element to its success is how the “system of technologies and processes” reacts to “real-time demand” in the most timely and efficient manner, thereby creating the greatest consumer value possible, as measured by (1) growth and (2) profitability.
Entrepreneurs like Dell that continue to adapt rapidly advancing technologies are emerging as strategically vital orchestrators of faster-moving supply networks that are spectacularly leaner, faster, and many times more responsive to consumers than any competitors are. The end game just might be the realization of the definitive vision of mass customization.
The Next Great Entrepreneurs – Predictive Mobile Apps
Published April 22, 2011 | Predictive Modeling for Luxury Mobile Applications
Mobile marketing success is realized through the development of an effective chronological sequencing of select value-driven functions that are designed to play to the strengths of the mobile medium. Targeted focus must be allocated to location recognition, extensive knowledge of the consumer, predetermined personalized messaging, a clearly defined deliberation path, specific behavioral rewards, and provision of a path for sharing within a tightly-knit social graph, especially in high-end and luxury market niches.
At its most fundamental, the predictive model for productive influence in mobile marketing must be designed within the following logical structure and outline from the consumer’s point of view:
(1) Know my location - (GPS Location Recognition)
(2) Cater to my interests - (Extensive Knowledgebase)
(3) Engage me through exclusivity – (Personalized Messaging)
(4) Encourage me to act – (Clearly Defined Deliberation Path)
(5) Reward me – (Specific Behavioral Rewards)
(6) Allow me to share – (Provisional Path for Sharing)
One of the most important and distinguishing functions of smartphone devices is location-awareness. Knowledge of the location of an app subscriber through their GPS coordinates allows experienced marketers the opportunity to proactively communicate structured messages that are designed specifically to drive targeted consumers into the boutique.
Encompassing features of exclusivity and integrated time-sensitivity as essential variables in the mobile success formula serves to produce a Marionette Effect – 
a well-orchestrated manipulation of high-end luxury consumer passions, fueled specifically by the desire for that which only a limited few can realize and reach.
Further enabling the strong social influence of very tightly formed networks of like-minded fashion enthusiasts and devotees allows for the achievement of the predictive model for mobile marketing success, by permitting high-end and luxury enthusiasts to share highly-valued branded content within their exclusive social graph via Facebook and Twitter.
The luxury consumer has dreadfully little patience for what they perceive as clutter or noise. The value of precision mobile engagement takes on increased importance given the extremely personal nature of the mobile-device. The predictive model for mobile application marketing provides a structured agenda for successful engagement, but an ever-present and pervasive thought of precisely how to connect in a highly-exclusive manner, is the lifeblood and essence of truly convincing loyalty campaigns. Exclusivity is the most basic compelling desire of high-end and luxury consumers.
The Next Great Entrepreneurs – Luxuries & Cravings
Published April 13, 2011 | 
One major resulting affect of the Great Recession has been to create a smarter, more selective, value-minded consumer market. Retailers, hungry for sales, have cultivated that by acclimatizing and getting shoppers used to expecting both excellent products and services at reasonable prices. Those expectations of a value-focused global consumer market will continue as a direct result.
Some Entrepreneurs have recognized online shoppers’ desire for high-end services and products at an affordable price and launched high-quality online eCommerce sites, thus creating do-it-yourself-at-home with our super convenient product and service businesses. Every order can be custom-designed or blended and made to order by experts, and then shipped directly to the client–all for prices lower then can be found at any brick-and-mortar location.
Larger corporations are able to recognize changes in consumer behavioral spending and capitalize on the appearance of moderately priced luxuries. As a result, many budget hotels are directing major capital-spending into renovations and added quality amenities.
Motel 6 recently started revamping many of its properties including the addition of crisp new linens, larger plasma-screen TVs, vibrantly 
colored walls and modern furniture to match.
Holiday Inn and its franchisees are implementing a billion-dollar overhaul including new signage, friendlier rooms for business-travelers, high-comfort bedding and ramped-up customer service.
To-date, the improvements seem to be having a positive effect, evidenced by Holiday Inn customer satisfaction-ratings at its highest level since 2005, a J.D. Power and Associates survey found. Since the results were published and announced, both Super 8 and Red Roof Inn also have announced similar capital-spending plans for sweeping upgrades.
Customer Analysis – Decision Making Process
Published December 31, 2010 | 
To complete the Customer Analysis there is one last critical step that shows a complete understanding of the actual decision-making process. Examples of questions that need to be answered here include will the customer speak to others in their organization prior to making a decision? Will the customer request several bids? Will the product/or service call for substantial operational changes and have to invest time to learn new technologies? Will the product/or service bring about other members within the organization to lose their jobs?
It is necessary for you to correctly understand customers to create and develop a winning marketing strategy. This is extremely important since experienced high-level investors call for complete and all-inclusive profiles of a business’s target niche customers.
Consumer Targets & Partners
Most businesses target many consumer categories or segments, and each consumer segment that is very crucial to the business model you have developed have got to be detailed in this section. In addition, if partners are also crucial to the business’s marketing success, the plan has to specifically detail the partners the business seeks out, the wants and requirements of these partners, and how the partners’ management decision-making process operates.
The Zen of Success – Awareness
Published July 2, 2010 | 
Consumer awareness is such an interesting yet very powerful force that has entire markets in a ceaseless battle to capture it, and of course there are different traditional methods that most businesses are still locked into including “buying” awareness with advertising, “begging” for awareness from the different media (public relations), and “bugging” people one at a time to sell them something.
Now most organizations have a corporate culture years in the making which is based on one of the traditional approaches to create awareness, they don’t know anything else, and are typically not open to any other method that hasn’t been used for years and is taught in business schools across the globe as that’s the way it’s 
always been taught and used in the markets.
Consumer awareness or attention itself has become the new common currency for modern Social Media and Web Marketing, and what is interesting about this notion of attention as a common currency is that once you understand this fact and embrace it, a lot of the other mysteries surrounding this consumer-centric marketing start to fall into place.
Consumer-centric marketing can be simplified to three guiding principles, with the first principle is that customer relationship management (CRM) has ultimately morphed into a business philosophy driven by market forces and supported by technology. 
The second principle is that media channels or platforms are collapsing into a single stream of two-way dialogue between brand and consumer and should be treated as such.
And finally, in the extremely noisy, hyper-competitive digital media landscape that we live in, awareness is becoming the ultimate common currency for the new modern marketing.
If you think of awareness as a medium, it is the first medium where the consumer controls the inventory of this medium, not the Fortune 500 advertiser or the major media company or the ad agency, the consumer enjoys the control, has the leverage in the market, and will direct the awareness or attention where they perceive getting the greatest value in return for their awareness and attention, and giving them additional leverage is the direct and secondary influence they with members of their social graphs and networks.