If you’re printing on large sheets, offset presses are a better choice (13×19 is the maximum for digital presses) and can be more economical if you’re printing in black and white or with limited colors. Offset also gets a slight edge when it comes to photo quality and resolution –a prime consideration if your project is image-heavy.

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Why do most prices end in 99 cents?

I was so curious as to why many prices end in 99 cents that I wrote an entire doctoral thesis about it!  My conclusion? Consumers are lazy subtractors.

Let me explain. Continue here.

If you took a basic marketing class, you may remember the Four P’s of Marketing. But have you thought about applying them in your business today? Let’s do an introduction to the Four P’s, and see if you come up with any new ideas for your business.

You can think of marketing as everything except making your product, or doing your service work. The Four P’s of Marketing are Price, Place, Promotion, and Product. Continue here.

Photo by revger, on Flickr

That’s quite a promise. The quote is from Scott Taddiken, of the Washburn Small Business Development Center, quoted in the Agurban in 2009 and repeated this week.

I went searching for the source of that “four times more likely to buy” statistic. What I found was a great article by Bruce Baker in The Crafts Report, How to get Customers 4x more likely to buy.

“Once a customer holds something in their hands, they are four times more likely to buy it,” Baker said.

Baker continues with a specific trick to make your signs and displays much, much more effective.

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Scan it!

If you’ve leafed through your favorite magazine or gone window shopping lately, you’ve probably noticed QR codes, those small black-and-white boxes filled with a pattern of tiny black squares.

Proponents of these codes, also called 2-D bar codes, say they are the future of interactive shopping. They work like this: Shoppers with smartphones download special application software for free, then open the app and hold their phones over the codes they see in print ads, outdoor ads, direct mail pieces, business cards, and so on. In-depth information about a product is then displayed on their phones.

With the codes popping up all over, small business owners may be wondering if this is something that would work, or is even necessary, as a part of their marketing efforts. It’s a good question. But there are some other questions marketers need to ask themselves before they decide if QR codes will work for their business.

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Good design helps establish trust. Professional design helps to establish a company as trustworthy. Consumers are often wary of businesses that “look” unprofessional.

Good design stands out from the competition. In a world loaded with stuff that looks like all the other stuff and performs like all the other stuff, design is a way to stand out.*

Good design helps improve stickiness. It costs far more to get a customer than to keep one. Good design affects loyalty, trial and word-of-mouth. When your customers become your sales people, you get far more sales than you would without their recommendations.

* Tom Peters

Compete.com can give you the answers. Continue here.