Business trends are changing everywhere and every kind of business. Think about any business you can imagine about, it has been changed the way it used to be over the time. If you can not catch the changing trend, you are likely losing a lot. How you smell the trend? How to prepare yourself for the change? How do you know which trend works and which not? Definitely you should be able to judge your intuition.

Follow the media. You will see all sorts of discussions on different subject areas like business, real estate, fashion, travel, education, personal life, investment opportunities, technology trends, innovations, innovators and many others. Just keep your eyes open to these media. You can spot a lot of information about the latest trends, future prospects and business opportunities from media.

As you see, most of the business today are people centric. People chose the trend. When you read papers or listen to the news and discussions in TV, Radio or when you talk to your customers in your store, listen to their interest. Try to find out where is your customers are heading? Try to segment your market, what segment of your customers are choosing which trend? You must learn from the trends. There are not only the new trends on product interests, its use and designs, but also there are new trends in reaching to your target market, the way you present yourself and also the way you present the contents. Businesses use celebrities as brand ambassadors to endorse their brands. Ads include customer testimonials. Ads use children as brand promoters. Products are launched in YouTube.com with video demos. Products and services are promoted using blogs. Event notifications are sent through mobile SMS. A lot more …. trends….

Do these trends help you, the entrepreneurs?

Look out of the box and gather the information from different channels. Read the business, technology and fashion magazines. Browse the Internet and watch the TV shows where people discuss their way of life, business and culture. Just need to start thinking and looking out of the box. You are with the trend.

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The blogosphere is one of the biggest achievements of the decade which changed the meaning and perceived values of different things that were established over the centuries. No technology brought the people’s participation so engaging than the blogs ever before. Blogging has become medium for expressing aspirations, promoting business, connecting people, making consensus and for thousands of many other reasons. Hundreds of millions of people world wide either run blogs or participate and contribute to them.

I am trying to list here few of the reasons why people blog. Write your reasons in comment area to expand and make this list more comprehensive. People are motivated and engaged tirelessly to operate blogs for one or more of the following reasons.

To make money
This is the most motivating reason people start blogging. They create blogs to generate traffic that they make money from Google adSense and other click and impression based ads providers. If blog traffic is high, you get advertisements more easily.

To establish and enhance brand
Small and large businesses today run blogs to enhance their another business or sell another product/service. People are
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Chris Garrett, one of the founders of Performancing and writer of one of those must-read ebooks - “Killer Flagship Content” has compiled and posted the Flagship Content Roundup. It’s my pleasure and luck to have my flagship content featured in his flagship blog. Chris is one of the respected blog gurus in blogosphere who offer valuable blogging advice to bloggers. I learned a lot from him.

He did the roundup for three reasons:

1. To link out to content (it’s always nice to reward readers)
2. To see what other bloggers thought Flagship Content was
3. To prompt readers who do not have any to create some!

Thanks Chris for featuring my content from my blog post What you need to become an entrepreneur

He included the excerpt as follows:

• Do you believe in what you have written? Have you invested emotional capital? Rajesh says of his post What you need to become an entrepreneur
  

  “The concept of Emotional Capital is so critical to entrepreneurship, and yet I rarely see it discussed. Launching a new venture has got to be one of the most exhilarating experience in business. But like all things that matter, the entrepreneurial process has its ups and downs. Understanding the emotional aspect of this process is critical to success.”

  I think you can say the same about blogging, so it is a good example of both

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I have discovered that one unhappy customer who is treated rudely will tell ten other people about the incident, but she will not - generally speaking - tell anybody who can do anything about the problems, namely the supervisor of the individual with whom she was dealing. The sad thing is that those ten people who have been told about the problem will, on average tell five other people. Put your pencil to it. That means these are fifty people who have heard your name and your company’s name in a negative way. it doesn’t take an awful lot of unhappy customers to put a company out of business and halt the career of the employee.

When you treat a coworker rudely or thoughtlessly, the same principle is in effect. Generally speaking, he will tell 10 other coworkers who will turn around and tell five more. Even in large organizations, it doesn’t take long for you to establish a negative reputation.

The procedure for coping with these problems is very similar to that used for handling other customer service problems. The minute a problem arises and you become aware of it, deal with it all possible haste. Typical customers (internal and external) are not interested in excuses; they’re interested in a solution to the problems. They don’t want you making excuses or blaming someone else. They’re not interested in fixing the blame - they’re interested in fixing the problem! if you will quickly apologize for the inconvenience and/or delay and get busy working on the solution, you will take giant strides toward building a solid “internal” reputation.

Find out what it will take to make your valued peer happy and bring the solution to the problem. Once the problem is “fixed,” check back in a day or two to make absolutely certain the “fix” was permanent and the coworker is happy. A week later, a handwritten note will score lots of points. The reality is, the aggressive, professional manager will capitalize on those opportunities to “win friends and influence people.”

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In brand making, there is nothing important than connecting your brands to people in general. In one of my previous posts on branding, I mentioned about the emotional brand approach. To connect your brand with the people in personal level, you should be able to connect your brand with people’s value, their way of life, their culture. You should not forget that you do business with people. If people’s emotions and your brands are far apart, people will not carry your brand.

Those of you, who are thriving to make their brand, you must understand the framework for engaging people on your brand building.

I already wrote in few of my blog posts about emotional branding. I feel emotional branding is the thrust for success in today’s world - business and social. Branding is about cultural relevance and emotional connection, not hype. Most of the brands are hyped and virtual. I think branding is an organic process and that is built upon the layers of emotional connections with the people. You should understand that brands have its own innate life cycle. The success of the brand at any time reference depends on its relevance at that time and by how well it can protect the values for people. Because of the technology, accessibility and availability of anything through out the world, brands are made successful and scraped every day and it’s fully because of its emotional relevance with the people and its commitment to quality. Just take few minutes and think, how many brands you were fan of in past are still your favorites? Real brands are about meaning and consistent truth. To get people connected in a long-term relationship with your brand, you should keep your eye opened and feel the dynamics of people’s emotions and market trend and always be ready for any kind of market changes. It depends on how well you can cope yourself and your brand with the changes.

If you accept these facts, then I think, it will lead you towards sustainable brand making. I hope this will help you to devise, launch, and then managing your successful, emotionalized brand.

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In my last post Broaden your marketing knowledge, I mentioned about the Robert Cialdini and his book. Today I will summarize what I learned from him.

Principles of persuasion in marketing:

1. Reciprocation
2. Commitment and consistency
3. Social proof
4. Liking
5. Authority
6. Scarcity

In layman terms, reciprocity means exchanging gifts. When you give gifts, people feel obliged to return the favor (to reciprocate). The entire Internet is based on reciprocity. Almost everything is free. But have you noticed that there are always options to pay for more personalized service?

One example of reciprocity is giving something for free. You can offer free samples of your product or few hours of service free. Giving something free is always a smart marketing strategy. People tend to taste first before taking risk of anything. Those who taste and want more can pay for the full treatment.

The next principle is commitment and consistency. In layman terms, this means calculated small steps. This principle
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Do you keep record of your client details? Have you ever analyzed who is giving you more business? How many clients came to you once and never came for second project? What is the frequency of projects coming from repeat clients? What does it take you to get your customers to come back to you again with new projects and requests? It depends on what your business is, how often they need your services, and how well you have treated them well, how much care you have given to their previous projects, what was your effort to put excellence in their projects and again how much you’re reminding them to come back. Could you make a mark? Leave your image to your clients.

It’s now time to check back your clients, their projects, and evaluate the relationship with each of them. Prepare a chart to see, who is most valuable to you and your business. This chart will give you a clear picture of your success or failure status in business. Number of repeat clients is the measure of your business success.

Repeat customers can be built only by offering the consistently high quality products or services, proving integrity in your deals and maintaining the level of excellence high in all deliverables.

You already read my blog post “Is there any formula for Customer Retention?” on customer retention. Convincing a new customer to try your product or service is only a beginning of your journey. The goal is to retain the customers and have them return again and again with new projects and requests and even make them so loyal to your service that they tell
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“The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing a thing exactly right”
- Edward Simmons

Giving focus on details builds the foundation for the excellence and that leads to successful work habits. Its very important that you put the excellence into what you do. Success is inevitable if you are innovative, you care your customers, and you make sure that all staffs in your firm participate in achieving the goals set.

In any kind of business, as in our everyday life, only excellence can make the difference. What is excellence? How do you measure the excellence?
Excellence is the completeness that you don’t leave off the last mile; you deliver the service to your customers efficiently and effectively, you always strive to push the envelop and your customers are happy and loyal; your deliverables are accurate and appropriately scheduled, and you are fully responsible for the complete job you undertake. When you strive to achieve excellence in business, customers comes to you for your service, they are ready to wait until you are free to take up their jobs, they spread your wisdom of excellence to others. Excellence is one of the the basic essence of “word of
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For any new business entrepreneurs pricing is perhaps one of the most mind scratching exercises when preparing business plan. It is always difficult to tag the price on the value that you provide your customers. I have not seen any absolute formula for calculating the real value price of your product or service considering the customer emotions.

Pricing any products or services is not a one-time excercise. Carefully analyzing the market dynamics, your costs, customer loyalty and emotions, purchasing level of consumers, market competition, your brand position in market, demands, your cash position and many other factors influence the price and you will have to revisit the price chart and revise many times. But you will have to consider if the price is appealing to the consumers or not. And also evaluate the profit margin for yourself.

It is always difficult to tag the price on the value that you provide your customers. I have not seen any absolute formula for calculating the real value price of your product or service considering the customer emotions.

You cannot survive if you charge less than the cost you spend to produce the product or deliver the service. By estimating the total cost of operation of your business, you find out the break-even point of your business. Based on that you can set the prices for your products and services. Consider all your costs, amount you want to save, salaries, promotion costs,
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accenture
‘High Performance. Delivered.’

Sorry, it was not an ad from “accenture” in my blog. I just got my eyes caught on an advertisement published in “The Economist“. It clearly communicated me about the “accenture” values. I flipped other pages to see more other ads, I found more meaningful taglines - Australian - Fly with smile; Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts - When life feels perfect; and so on… I took out old issues of the magazine and found whole lot of ads with beautiful and meaningful taglines.

I remember how long it took me to fix my own mantra. I spent quite a lot of time to come out with my own. First I had to decide my own mission. I had to know myself what is my goal. I spent quite a lot of time trying to understand my real capabilities, my passion and prospects. Based on my mission, I drew my mantra, my tagline - “Helping Technopreneurs to excel and lead their life!“. Look at the top banner in my blog. Whatever I am writing, it’s one of the activities I am undertaking to achieve my goal.

Taglines, sometimes called slogans, motto, mantra, advertising slogan or business slogans are short expressions with few
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