Coffee shop employees sometimes “salt the tip jar” — putting a dollar or two in an empty jar to influence customer behavior. Now, some in the real estate industry are borrowing the idea and implementing it on a much larger scale. Home staging companies have been around forever — real estate companies hire them to make vacant houses […]
Sometimes innovation means going backwards. And sometimes it means moving an old concept to a new industry. Much has been made lately about the return of the layaway plan — a long-out-of-fashion retail program in which an item is kept at the store while the customer makes payments on it. Until recently, the layaway had […]
If there’s one thing becoming increasingly clear in 2008, it’s that marketing techniques that have worked for years — and in some cases decades — may not get the job done anymore. Like it or not, the market’s different now. Nobody knows if the differences are temporary or permanent. But for the short term, at […]