If You Had Only a Dollar, What Would You Spend It On?

Bill Gates once said, "If I was down to my last dollar, I'd spend it on public relations."

Were I in his shoes, I'd spend it on content.

"Content is the new black," says marketing maven Janine Popick in Inc.

Content helps you generate leads, elevate search engine rankings and close more deals, Popick says.

Content works because it positions you as an expert.

"Because you're writing (or talking) about what you know, in time, you become an industry thought leader. And people prefer doing business with those they believe are experts in their category," Popick says.

Should Your Ads Include Details?

A customer's natural craving for details will determine how she responds to your advertising, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Customers who hunger for details will eat them up, if you provide tons of them in your ads.

But customers who don't care for details will be turned off by your information-heavy ads, and probably won't buy your product.

The study's authors say there are two types of customers, distinguishable by their desire to understand things.

Some customers like to think; some don't.

From a series of experiments the authors conclude that, by presenting a lot of product information to the latter group, you remind those customers they're shallow.

That reminder makes them feel uncomfortable—and less likely to buy from you.

In related experiments, the authors also found that the latter type of customer is less willing to pay a premium price when the ads for a product are detail-heavy.

How to Make a Bundle

New research from Harvard Business School and Carnegie Mellon University shows that bundling products can increase purchases significantly if customers have the option to buy the products separately.

Studying sales of video consoles and games, the authors of The Dynamic Effects of Bundling as a Product Strategy found that bundling in fact increases product purchases.

However, if customers cannot compare the prices of the products when sold individually to the prices of the same products when bundled, many will undervalue the bundled products and postpone their purchases. 

That's because they assume the products must drop in price eventually, so savings will be theirs by waiting.

So if you want to drive sales of bundled products, be sure to also price and offer the products individually.

A Plea for Civility

Just when you were ready to throw culture to the dogs, Copybloggers' Sonia Simone issues The Civility Manifesto.

"If you write and publish regularly on the Web, you’re an influencer—whether you have 100 readers or a million," she writes. "And I’d like to call on all of us to work together and return some civility to the Web."

Without a greater measure of civility on influencers' part, Simone predicts that "anonymous creeps and soulless bullies" will soon rule the Web.

She asks influencers to rally behind five principles:

1. Recognize diversity as our strength (respect different people and views)
2. Stop using the language of trolls (avoid abusive words and phrases)
3. Stop giving attention to anonymous trolls (ignore them, block them, report them)
4. Look for connection (empathize with people you disagree with) 
5. Be real (stay honest, but "respect your own dignity and that of your fellow human beings")

Entrepreneurial ADD

Bonus tip from P.T. Barnum's 1880 playbook Art of Getting Money.

Management consultants and business writers love to quote young CEOs who insist they're about to disrupt the universe.

But, for every 30 year-old billionaire, there are a million visionaries who chase barmy ideas. Worse, they chase too many.

I think they all suffer from a bad case of entrepreneurial ADD, complicated by an impulse to become the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Without doubt, success derives from a good idea. But much more than that, it demands focus.

P.T. Barnum asked business people to think big, but stick to the knitting. Barnum wrote:

"Let hope predominate, but be not too visionary. Many persons are always kept poor, because they are too visionary. Every project looks to them like certain success, and therefore they keep changing from one business to another, always in hot water, always 'under the harrow.' The plan of 'counting the chickens before they are hatched' is an error of ancient date, but it does not seem to improve by age."