In the early years of my business we held very few meetings. With a small staff we were able to communicate easily and informally. But as the staff grew in size, so did the quantity of meetings, eventually leading to a meeting albatross. We found ourselves spending almost as much time in meetings than in producing our work. Something had to be done, so, well, we called a meeting! A meeting on meetings! It turned out to be a very productive meeting.

For those of you who attend NGA each year, there’s a chance you heard me speak in workshops in 2003, 2004 and 2006 about the same topic: namely, what is the future of the printed ads in supermarkets? If you are going to depend on print advertising to deliver your marketing messages, you best have an outstanding printed piece that attracts new customers.

Throughout your store you carry many nationally branded products sold at every one of your competitor’s stores. Do your customers prefer Hunt’s Ketchup or Heinz Ketchup? It really doesn’t matter to you which brand they buy, as long as they buy it at your store. You can’t help Hunt’s or Heinz differentiate their brands—the only way you can differentiate them is with your shelf price.

It’s a different story in your deli department.

Wikipedia defines positioning in this way: “…Positioning is something (perception) that happens in the minds of the target market. It is the aggregate perception the market has of a particular company, product or service in relation to their perceptions of the competitors in the same category. It will happen whether or not a company’s management is proactive, reactive or passive about the on-going process of evolving a position. But a company can positively influence the perceptions through enlightened strategic actions.”

DW Green Company takes home two Honorable Mentions in Advertising! Honorable Mention Advertising “How Sweet It Is” Elden’s Food Fair, Alexandria, MN Honorable Mention Advertising “Bird Meets Grill” Hurley’s, Grand Harbor, Grand Caymon View all of our awards

How can you track visitors to your website? What are they looking at? What are they ignoring? Do they “click-through” on your email promotions? How much time should you invest in studying your website traffic? What do you do with the information once you have it?

A website tracking system shows you exactly how your website is performing.

The primary goal of effective advertising is to attract an audience and motivate them to action. The goal is to drive customer traffic. The goal is to differentiate your store and your ad from your competitors and to always support your stores strategic position. Effective ads do all of these things. The result is advertising that not only achieves the short-term goals of increased sales and customer count, but advertising that becomes the building blocks of tomorrow’s success and prosperity as well. Advertising store attributes often pays off in profitability even when it doesn’t immediately increase sales. It reinforces a stores differential status from competitors and reinforces many past and present experiences with satisfied customers. Indeed, image is often the only basis of comparison between similar but different alternatives.

A consultant group we respect recently recommended that companies wait to get involved in social media because there are “no clear and obvious benefits.” While they may not be “clear and obvious,” we believe that the benefits of social media are significant. Here are three of them…