E.G. Insight News and Notes

Over the past few weeks, the media has been buzzing about the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer study (click here for details: http://www.edelman.com/trust/2010/). It measures and reports the level of trust the general public has in entities like corporations, government, even friends and family. Some of the results are unexpected, such as the rise globally in the credibility people see in messages directly from the CEO and the lack of trust people have in their “inner circle” social network.

In accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures, filmmaker Martin Scorsese quoted Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That got me thinking…

When thinking about business-to-business customers, we rarely think about pizza chains – but maybe we should. Consider Domino’s Pizza: Advances in technology have helped improve their internal communication, shortened the time it takes to fulfill orders, and allow you to order a pizza online. Technology has been a huge part of Domino’s value proposition.

I’m not saying sales and marketing leaders in the business-to-consumer (B2C) space have it easy. They don’t. But they often do have relatively easy access to meaningful data. Collecting information from customer transactions and investigating trends has been aided by scanner data and mountains of empirical results. Do you want to know about the latest trends in consumer preferences for salty snacks?

In the September issue of Inc. Magazine, Alden Mills, founder of Perfect Fitness shares a part of his experience with Navy SEAL training:

“They’d say, ‘OK, it’s a four mile run.’ I’d run so hard, I’d throw up at the finish line. Then they’d say, ‘Now it’s a 10-mile run. Keep running.’”