It’s that time of year again... The smell of printer ink and anxiety pepper the air. People put on their game faces and psych themselves up to go head-to-head with the competition.

Confession: I’m 47 years old and my Instagram feed is filled with posts from college students. No, I’m not trying to relive my youth (though, I must admit it IS a fun trip down memory lane) - I have a high school senior getting ready to apply to college.

After 17 years of experience as a marketing professor, teaching, doing research, and working with companies, I settled finally on a 9-word imperative to help students understand competitive strategy...

When businesses talk about understanding customer choice they’re usually referring to the purchase decision, but this is just the last choice in a longer decision journey. Understanding all of the choices made throughout the customer journey is vital to growing your business and developing strategies to impact choices made earlier on can dramatically grow your sales pipeline.

When launching a new product or marketing campaign, the first question that must be answered is, “Who is my target audience?” Most brand leaders and marketers use demographics to identify their audience - objective data like gender, age, income, and marital status - and for some brands, this may be enough. A large cosmetics and skincare company for example could simply target women and still do quite well in reaching their buyers. But what if this skincare company wanted to launch a new, luxury vegan-ingredient product line? They would still likely reach their buyers using their current demographic targeting, but would also waste dollars reaching buyers that don’t have a preference for natural products and are not willing to pay a premium for them. Gathering subjective data like values, goals, and attitudes helps narrow down the target audience - and budget - to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing efforts.