Creating and maintaining a polished big company presence for you in the marketplace is the most valuable aspect of public relations. Polish is the result of quality and consistency—high quality communications and a consistent message. Public relations showcases, maximizes, and builds on the products, services, and customer-facing practices you already have in place through smart strategy and a truly impressive array of tools—that extend far beyond media releases. Customers a

Before you start planning a slew of projects for the year, revisit last year’s duds. A project that appears to be dead may be a prime candidate for revival. Make a list of projects that either you or someone else started, but never finished, last year and ask yourself these questions: Why did we drop the project? How far did it get? What’s changed since we dropped that project – company objectives, the competitive environment, project personnel, technology, etc.? What new inf

Albert Einstein said that if he had one hour to solve a problem he would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution. In fact, zeroing in on the right problem is so important that you could say a perfectly defined problem is not even a problem anymore. Consider this: A large municipal library had signs posted in its parking lot that said the lot was for library patrons only. Often, downtown shoppers ignored the signs – especially on weeke

Following are a few more nuggets from Dan Ariely’s excellent book on buying behavior, “Predictably Irrational”: The first price that people hear for a product or service is likely to become an anchor – they will strongly associate the value of the product or service with that price – no matter how the price fluctuates in the future. Everything becomes relative to that first price. We assume something is good or bad based on the behavior of others. Is “everyone” buying somethi