Podcast appearances and mentions of niraj dawar

About the guest:     If you want to know where agri-marketing is going, ask Sara. She's already seen it, studied it and figured out how it's digital. As president, Sara inspires clients, partners and staff to continuously learn, grow and innovate. Her strategic vision keeps Paulsen on the leading edge of ag marketing thought, digital and creative leadership. Sara is also the host of Spark: Careers in Agribusiness, a podcast where leaders in ag share advice for a successful career. Prior to taking over the agency reins, Sara was vice president of digital services. She joined Paulsen as a graphic designer in 1991. Sara is a graduate of the University of South Dakota and was raised on a row-crop and livestock farm in southeastern South Dakota. Because she doesn't have enough on her plate, she and her husband also own and operate a rural bed-and-breakfast.   In the episode:     4:18 - Sara describes how you need a passion for what you do and an appetite for learning to succeed in your career. 5:19 - Sara tells about studying search engines and how they work. 5:52 - Nancy and Sara chat about the two-day workshop Nancy did at Disney with Agency Management Institute which Sara attended and how she learned to incorporate PR into her advertising programs. 10:25 - Sara shares how she looks at engagement rates to measure success. 13:30 - After having a client that was worried about losing control of their brand on social media, Sara explains why thanking people for their comments and acknowledging their participation is important. 15:16 - Sara describes the techniques Paulsen has used to build their audience over the past ten years. 17:28 - Nancy and Sara talk about the benefits of having a niche. 24:23 - With recent privacy changes, Sara talks about the importance of building your own assets in terms of data. 30:11 - Based on the power of relationship building, Sara describes how to be intentional, helpful and memorable online. 34:54 – Sara shares a book that has helped her career.   Quote “It really doesn't matter where you reside. We all have access to great information and its really more about your attitude, willingness to work and again that appetite for learning and applying what you have learned. Sharing what you know.” – Sara Steever, president of Paulsen Marketing   Links:           Paulsen Marketing - https://www.paulsen.ag/ Marketing Over Coffee: https://www.marketingovercoffee.com/ Sharpspring: https://sharpspring.com/ TILT by Niraj Dawar: https://www.amazon.com/Tilt-Shifting-Strategy-Products-Customers/dp/1422187179 Spark: Careers in Agribusiness - https://www.paulsen.ag/thinking/spark/   Listen to Drew McLellan's PR Maven® Podcast episode Listen to Stephen Woessner's PR Maven® Podcast episode   Activate the PR Maven® Flash Briefing on your Alexa Device.   Join the PR Maven® Facebook group page.     Looking to connect:            Email: sara.steever@paulsen.ag LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarasteever/ Twitter: @ssteever

Sue Bethanis hosts Niraj Dawar, Professor Emeritus from the marketing group at the Ivey Business School in Canada. Niraj's research focuses on brand equity and brand management issues. He is author of the book TILT: Shifting your Strategy from Products to Customers and his published papers on brand extensions, consumers use of brand, and other signals as well as international consumer behavior have appeared in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Marketing Letters, Journal of Business Research, the Journal of International Business Studies, and other outlets. Niraj teaches PhD, MBA, and undergraduate courses in marketing management and brand management, as well as in Executive Education programs. Prior to joining the Ivey Business School, he was Associate Professor of Marketing at INSEAD, France. Niraj and Sue discuss: - How does marketing change in the “Age of Alexa”? - How AI platforms create value for consumers - Why AI data privacy will continue to face scrutiny

Download for offline listening. In one survey after another marketing leaders cite driving growth as their biggest challenge. Judgement of a CMO’s performance invariably boils down to one measure: the year-over-year increase in brand sales. And as much as marketers have glommed on to the idea of customer experience as a differentiator, they are still mainly accountable for selling more stuff to more people. That’s why marketing strategy and planning, according to Forrester Research, “remains stubbornly old school”. Marketers see their job as spear carriers for the brand, leading the hunt for new customers. The only thing that’s changed from past practices are the KPIs: Engagement now tops ad impressions – social shares trump share of voice. But the goals are still the same: create top-of-mind awareness; lead people down the path to purchase; get them to convert. No wonder the idea of putting customers first seems so abstract. Marketers are still caught up in the game of brand messaging. That game was relatively easy to play when the choices were confined to broadcast media. But today marketers are forced to spread their dollars across a broad mix of channels, hoping to catch customers at exactly the right moment. The problem: Messages go unnoticed in an ever-expanding universe of content. Audience attention is fleeting, measured in seconds, not minutes. So how do marketers get off this merry-go-round? What should their true role be? How do they lead their organizations out of the digital wilderness? And how, in fact, do they become more customer-centric when they are still organized around brands and products? In his book “Tilt”, Niraj Dawar, the esteemed Professor of Marketing at Ivey Business school, observes that “marketing, as a discipline, has been in a funk since the demise of mass marketing clipped its ability to move large numbers of customers to buy”. He sees today’s marketers as aspiring technicians “who understand data but not strategy”. He argues that product innovation is not enough – it only results in incessant leapfrogging. His idea: Marketing must go from asking, “How much more of this stuff can we sell?”, to “What else do our customers need?”. Marketing’s new role, he suggests, should be to “take charge of the entire customer relationship”. Marketers today need to give up their channel-based strategic planning processes in favour of delivering value at every stage of the relationship. Instead of “playing a game of R&D roulette”, as Professor Dawar puts it, marketers need to figure out which customer problems the brand is best positioned to solve.

Niraj Dawar joins us to talk about the intersection of voice marketing and the world of B2B. We discuss how to engage customers, how voice marketing compares to search marketing and SEO, and how voice marketing and AI are set to dominate the world of B2B Marketers.

Work in Progress: Anil Gupta, Roger Martin, Syd Finkelstein, Navi Radjou, Niraj Dawar, Mark Esposito, Subir Chowdhury and Juan Pablo Vazquez Sampere share their work in progress in this new Thinkers50 podcast

Niraj Dawar talks about his book Tilt, as well as three shifts that are taking place in business.

Niraj Dawar speaks about branding at the Thinkers50 2015 event.

Sales is the act of helping people solve problems. It only makes sense that the best salespeople are the ones who are able to best solve the problems their customers have. But how exactly do you determining if you or your competitors is doing the “best” job at that? On this episode of In the Arena you’re going to get one of the most significant parts of the equation explained to you clearly from Niraj Dawar, author of the powerful sales book, “Tilt.” Anthony digs into the concepts of differentiation and customer risk in this conversation, two concepts that can literally transform the way you do sales and the success you experience. You’ve got to hear this one. Are you asking the questions that enable you to differentiate your sales process?Click To Tweet What are “upstream” and “downstream” activities in the sales process? Niraj Dawar makes a clear distinction between what he calls the “upstream” and “downstream” activities involved in the sales cycle because he believes that clearly seeing and understanding the difference is one of the main ways that salespeople are able to focus more on customer needs and bring the features and benefits of their products to bear on those needs. Anthony and Niraj unpack that idea in their conversation on this episode, showing you how a focus on the “downstream” side of sales (the part that’s aimed at understanding customer needs and risks) to amplify your sales presentations and approach. Why competing on price and cutting cost can only go so far. We’ve all seen the “race to the bottom” that happens when two companies with identical products or services begin to compete on price. For the sake of getting new business each begins to cut costs wherever they can, lowering the price as an enticement to the customer to purchase from them. There’s nothing that makes one company stand out over the other except the issue of pricing. How do you get out of that cycle and make your offer stand out even if the price you’re asking is higher? It’s by differentiating yourself in ways specific to the needs of the customer. On this episode you’re going to learn the key questions you need to ask in order to do that. The most important sales book of 2015, with Niraj Dawar on this episode of In The ArenaClick To Tweet Why understanding and addressing customer risk can increase your sales. Your customers have a job to do and they are looking to your product or service to help them get that job done. But whether or not they tap you as the one to provide what they need depends on many things beyond price. They’ve got specific risks or costs inherent to the project at hand and the better you understand what those are, the better able you will be to position your product in a way that addresses those risks effectively, resulting in the sale - and the confidence of your customers over the long haul. Find out how to move your sales process in that direction on this episode of In The Arena with Anthony Iannarino. How Hyundai increased sales during a dramatic period of economic recession. One of the stories that Niraj Dawar recounts in his book, “Tilt” is the story of how Hyundai made some dramatic decisions during a steep economic downturn that actually increased their sales when the rest of the competition experienced serious losses. The approach they took is an example of what Niraj points to as the key in making your sales offerings stand out among the competition even when financial consideration for the prospective customer are at a very serious level. You’ll learn a lot from this episode, so be sure to listen. Increasing sales even in the midst of a recession, on this episode of In The ArenaClick To Tweet Outline of this great episode [0:46]  Anthony’s introduction of Niraj Dawar and the conversation on this episode. [1:46] Why Anthony felt the concepts of the book were powerfully relevant for salespeople. [2:33] The difference between “upstream” and “downstream” activities in sales...

Niraj Dawar is a Professor at the Ivey Business School and with a wealth of corporate experience as an expert marketing strategist. Niraj has wrote one of the most important books I have read as a customer centric marketer this year. Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy From Products to Customers. Key strategic questions that I earmarked in reading Tilt  by Niraj Dawar are as follows: 1. Why do your customers choose you? Make sure it is not table stakes. 2. What business are you in? What business do your customers think you are in? How have they defined you? The answer you give to this question is predictive of how you see your business strategy 3. How is profitability measured? By customer or by volume? 4. Where do you spend most of your effort and energy? – on the service or product you sell or on understanding your customers and consistently delivering value to them by asking one fundamental question: What else do our customers need? “Today manufactures can replicate the looks and feel of an innovative product and print it to market for a fraction of the price, in a fraction of the time it use to take. Even Nike and HP manufacture their products in Asia.” Tilt pg 178 5. How can we take what we know about our customers and provide value in different ways. Niraj gives a indepth interview with me around the reason he wrote Tilt, the difference between upstream and downstream strategies and what it was like to present the book to the Canadian president! More information: strategytilt.com Blog My article on Tilt

Providing great products and services is expected in today's competitive environment. You need them just to play in the marketplace. To win, you have to think about your interactions with customers. It isn't about how much you can sell, says Niraj Dawar, author of TILT. It's about what else your customers need.