Does your company make a product?  Are you in sales?  Are you responsible for the marketing of a certain material or commercial good?  How about a commodity?  Over the long haul, why do your customers, consumers, clientele, patients or students continue to come back to you in order to obtain the service or product that you represent or sell?  Why?  

Why do people choose to continually buy Coke when Pepsi is always on sale?  Why do people buy iPhones when they could settle for a phone that is a quarter of the price?  Why do people consistently attend the same church service at the same church week in and week out?     Why are more and more people reading blogs to get their news instead of the Times?  Why do people shop at Wal-Mart instead of the corner hardware store?  Why do students delay taking a certain class in order to take it with a specific professor when they could take it right now and get it over with?  Why will a patient drive for hours to go to his dentist when there is another dentist down the street?

Here is why:  They, the consumer, like the product.  The results they get from the product or service (or both!) are great, they are proven and the consumer loves a great, reliable, proven product.    

Do you blame Mayor Ballard?  Surely not!  Instead, blame Toyota!  They have the better product (more fuel efficient for example).  How can you fault someone for buying the better product when we do it ourselves every single day.

•  In business for 25 years
• Pays workers an average of $17 an hour
• Covers 90% of insurance costs for full-time and part-time employees
• Stock has doubled
• Revenues have grown by 70% over the past 5 years
• “You have to recognize — and I don’t mean this in an acrimonious sense — that the people in that business are trying to make money between now and next Thursday. We’re trying to build a company that’s going to be here 50 and 60 years from now. We owe that to the communities where we do business. We owe that to our employees, that they can count on us for security. We have 140,000 employees and their families; that’s a significant number of people who count on us. We owe it to our suppliers. Think about the people who produce products for us — you could probably multiply our family of employees by three or four times. And we owe it to our customers to continue to offer good prices. Our presence in a community makes pricing better throughout that community because when you have a tough competitor in the marketplace, prices come down.”  CEO, Jim Senegal
• They recycle 100% of the boxes that goods are shipped to their stores in
• Changed the shape of their cashew boxes in order to improve packaging thus saving the company 560 truckloads a year for shipping that single product (cashews).