Argentum Blog

Argentum's blog, Marketing Op-Ed, highlights interesting, real-world examples of marketing with a little bit (okay, a lot) of opinion thrown in. It's written by Susan Silver, President of Argentum Strategy Group, with the occasional guest blogger added to the mix.

Case Study: Building Miniat’s Marketing from the Ground Up

Background Ed Miniat LLC, a fifth-generation, family-owned business, has been supplying high quality sous vide meats to customers since 1896. The company has an outstanding reputation for quality in the B2B food manufacturing industry. Their products are served in many Top 100 Quick Serve Restaurants (QSRs) nationwide and are used as the...

Your Best Customers Are Your Best Creative Brief

When I was working on the Minute Rice ® marketing early in the 90’s, the brand had a problem. Many people thought Minute Rice was fake because the rice grains were split in a shrimp-like shape. (In reality, the grains looked that way because the rice was pre-cooked, which is why it cooks so fast.) The brand team before mine had spent a lot of...

AI Agents Are Changing How People Shop

During a job interview with a well-known over-the-counter (OTC) pharmaceutical company in the 1990s, the brand team shared something that stuck with me: If a consumer tried the generic version of their flagship over-the-counter pain reliever, they considered that customer lost to the brand forever. The reason? In the US, generics and name-brand...

The Future of Customer Service

Three of my clients are deep into website redesign projects, and I’ve been involved in a lot of related conversations about customer service team communication, FAQs, and online resources. Each client wants to make sure that their site is as user-friendly as possible, because we all know that keeping existing customers happy is a critical part of...

How Many Survey Responses Are Enough?

If I had $1 for every time a company wanted to treat a small number of survey responses as being statistically representative of their customer base, I’d be a very rich woman! Many of us learned in stats class that n=30 is the absolute minimum for statistical significance. But small sample sizes come with a lot of caveats and issues, including...

Overkill: Ratings Review Burnout

In 2016, I was so intrigued by the novelty of ratings buttons in a restroom in the Frankfurt airport that I snapped this photo. Just eight years later, the constant barrage of feedback requests has become overwhelming, even for this market research enthusiast. Eric Taub explores this trend in his New York Times piece about ratings review burnout,...

Arts Marketing Evolves With Memberships

Arts marketing is an interesting niche within the marketing world. Despite being a passionate theatregoer, I hadn’t thought much about how it differs from marketing products and services until Chicago’s Northlight Theatre Company became one of Argentum’s early clients. To prepare for the project, I read Arts Marketing Insights, by former...

How to Hire a Creative Agency

Over the past eighteen years, Argentum has helped many clients find the agency that’s right for them. With marketing teams busier than ever, demand for this service surged in 2024, with four successful searches and a fifth currently underway. Our goal for every search is to match clients with an agency that is appropriate for their needs, budget,...

Pricing Research: How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?

Determining how to price your product or service appropriately is always tricky, but it can be especially difficult for companies with limited or non-existent market research resources. ADVANCED TOOL A team of professors at Kellogg recently identified a new methodology that can provide more accurate data about the maximum price a customer would...

Is It Time To Exhibit At That Tradeshow?

For B2B businesses, trade shows can present powerful sales and marketing opportunities. Exhibiting at one of these target-rich events can facilitate invaluable lead-generation and accelerate awareness-building for companies of all sizes and life stages. For the 60% of Argentum clients that are B2B, trade shows are typically a hot topic during...

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