 I moved from working in my business to working on my business!
Jim White, Founder Savor Dallas http://www.savordallas.com |
 I found a community of business leaders who make being in business a lot more fun and less lonely.
Jeannine Sandstrom, CEO CoachWorks International, Inc. http://www.coachworks.com |
 I now have a place to be open about my business success and future challenges.
Debbie Mrazek, CEO The Sales Company Author The Field Guide to Sales http://www.the-sales-company.com |
Posts Tagged ‘Branding’
Do you have customers that leave suddenly? You were doing an outstanding job for them, lavishing them with truckloads of service and yet they disappeared without a word.
The key operating factor here is ‘without a word.’ That’s the scary part! The silent ones are always the most dangerous. If you would like to learn how to keep your customers, you’ve first got to keep them noisy. Read this marketing article to find out just how you can make complaining clients one of your biggest assets.
Imagine you run a pizza parlor.
You have all these neighborhood families that pop in at least once a week for some pizza, garlic bread and Coke. On an average, one customer spends about $30 per week. But let’s assume they spend just $20. Imagine you did something that bugged this customer, but he or she never told you about it. What would you stand to lose if they left?
Its simple math: You lose $20 x 50 weeks. That’s equivalent to $1000 a year.
If you lost just 10 such customers per month, you’d lose about 100 clients a year.
That’s $100,000 that could be in your back pocket if you were a little complaint-conscious.
That Doesn’t Happen in Our Business: The Denial Syndrome
Overtly it won’t. In a Bain & Company survey of major corporations, they found that on average, U.S. Corporations lose half their customers in five years. Notice, it wasn’t ‘one year’ or ‘suddenly’.
Clients have a tipping point. They get unhappy bit by bit and then its camel-back-breaking time. So, if you think that all your customers are happy with you-they aren’t. It’s a basic fact of life.
What’s really weird is that you can’t measure how much business you’re really losing. A study was done on a bank, they found they had as many accounts as they had a year ago. What they failed to measure was how most of the people had ‘silently’ transferred the money out into other banks and the closure of the account was a last measure, somewhere down the line.
The same thing applies to your customer.
Like a patient Buddha, they will seemingly appear to put up with everything, till suddenly you find they don’t use you anymore. This is a classic flight of business. You hear nothing of it, till it’s almost gone and it takes a mammoth effort just to hold on to the business.
If you look at it from another perspective, you might even be getting equal to or slightly less business from your customer. Naturally this doesn’t ring any alarm bells. However, if you’ve been watching carefully, your customer has probably grown bigger and richer in the past few months or years. If your business with them has not grown exponentially, you are actually LOSING OUT.
No matter how successful your business, you will always have scope for improvement. Best of all, you will always have complaining customers. Don’t deny the fact. Accept it and then do something about it.
The Real Reason Why You Lose Customers
Last month we went to KFC to pick up some chicken and chips for dinner. On the way home we discovered that the chicken and the chips were soggy and tasted terrible.
How would most customers react? It would depend on their history with the product, but most people would grumble and simply not go back. We complained. We picked up the phone and called the toll free line at KFC. They asked us to place our order.
We said we didn’t want to place an order, we just wanted to complain. They said, “We don’t take complaints on this line. You’ll have to call the manager at the branch where you bought it and talk to him.”
Now Why Would I Bother To Go Through All That Trouble?
It’s easier to never go back. All that money that KFC spends trying to get new customers is going down the drain and out the back door because they don’t have a complaint line.
Most companies act precisely in the same manner. For one, they have no real complaint department. If clients are unhappy, they feel embarrassed to complain and because no route has been cleared to vent their feelings, they avoid it completely.
Then they leave.
Obviously, you can’t wait for something to go wrong. Your job is to find ways to get the client to complain. If they complain, you are getting feedback that is extremely valuable and is probably relevant for all your other clients as well.
Best of all, empowered with a complaint channel, a well-trained client will complain at every juncture giving you the opportunity to fix the problem and regain their trust.
How Companies React to Complaints
Virgin Airlines CEO, Richard Branson, sometimes makes an appearance at the gates when a flight is late, apologizing profusely to all passengers as they check out. How mad would you continue to be if you ran into a situation like this?
Yet most companies detest complaints. Living in their ivory towers, they refuse to believe that any of their clients would leave. So they never ask for feedback. On the rare occasion that clients get mad enough to put it in words, it’s too late. Even then, a complaint is treated with nuisance value.
The first step a company takes when dealing with complaints is that they fix it.
Yeah, Right!
Because of their crummy service, the plane took off without you, you missed your meeting and lost more than just your temper. Do you think, just replacing something is going to erase all that trouble? It’s going to take much, much more.
A simple replacement is never the answer. It has to be a heck lot more than just a numb ‘sorry’ . You’ve got to woo the customer back like you would with the girl that you had your eye on.
Going down on your knees and begging for forgiveness is a start. Then you’ve got to lay it on thick and the thicker the better.
The Problem With Zero Defect
Lots of companies ran themselves into the ground trying to achieve zero defect. In an unpredictable world like ours, that goal is unreal.
Even the best of intentions aren’t much use if you run into a flash flood. Clients recognize that. However, it’s up to you to have a disaster recovery plan in place.
When I say that, I don’t mean a grandiose ‘in case of a nuclear attack’ plan.
At Nordstrom stores across the U.S., salespeople are empowered to do ‘whatever it takes’ to fix a problem, even if it means going to the store across the street and buying the product at a higher price.
It’s called the art of immediate recovery, and it assumes that something will go wrong and you will have a Plan B to fix it. The more you prepare yourself for this inevitable event, the less chance the client has to complain.
More often than not, a complaining client is complaining about everything but the product. Ever see people complaining about the food at a restaurant?
The principal purpose of the restaurant is food, yet people leave because of loud music, bad service and everything else. Your job is to assume you’re a restaurant and find out what your ‘everything else’ is.
Getting Complaints is Like Winning Lotto!
1) What you need to do to ensure a regular stream of complaints. Dump the feedback form and go out and ask your customer’s face to face. Do it regularly and have them know whom they can complain to, if anything goes wrong. There is no such thing as a silent customer.
2) Complaining customers are always very precise. They eliminate the vagueness of feedback forms. Listen to them, act on their complaints. It’s not that they want to leave. They want to be wooed back. Fix the problem and then let them know how you fixed it.
3) They’re giving you free feedback that would cost a fortune at a research company, so reward them. They’ve been inconvenienced on top of getting a bad product or service. That inconvenience factor deserves payment in the form of a reward over and above just fixing the problem. Customers who are bought back from the brink are extremely loyal and extremely ‘noisy.’ Treat them like the asset they are.
4) Remember, it costs eight times as much to get a new customer, than it takes to keep an existing one. Keep them at all costs. Atone for your sins.
5) Rule #1:The complaining customer is always right. Rule #2:When in doubt, refer to Rule #1
©2001-2008 Psychotactics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Article written by Sean D’Souza.
Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas? Find simple, yet electrifying ideas, on copywriting, public speaking, marketing strategies, sales conversion, psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com today and judge for yourself.
Let’s say you want to blow up a lab. What do you do?
You take two explosive chemicals and mix them together, right?
But what if you took Na + Cl and mixed them together somehow.
What would you get? You’d get salt. What’s worse is that the lab would not be ‘blown up.’
And you’d be a ‘failure’. The more labs you tried to blow with Na + Cl, the more you’d fail. And the more you fail, the more you’re going to fail.
And this slides us right into why most of us struggle to write.
You see we don’t struggle to write an email. We don’t write, re-write, re-think and then write something boring.
Our emails are crisp. They have flow. And ebb. They often have a storyline. Drama creeps in inevitably.
And it keeps the attention of the reader.
So if we examine the issue closer, it’s not that you can’t write.
It’s that when put in the spot to write something like an article or a sales letter. That’s when you freeze. The words get clumsy. And droopy. And inevitably, the fear of ‘past failures’ kicks in. Heck, even I find it hard to write under those conditions.
Because writing is mostly a factor of enthusiasm.
Or pathos.
Or fear.
Or anger.
It’s driven by emotion.
Yes, you can sit down and write clinically, but the words become kinda yucky. But when you’re having a conversation like this—one on one—then you’re no longer writing.
I’m not writing. You’re not reading. We’re ‘talking’ to each other.
The words flow. And ebb.
They grab hold of a storyline.
The drama sits precociously waiting its turn.
And it keeps your attention as a reader.
So then what causes great writing?
Ooh, I hate to boil down ability to any three things, but here goes anyway:
1) Failure freezes the brain
You can’t write with failure in mind. If you sit down to write with past experiences of ‘writing failure,’ you will inevitably fail time and time again.
Your brain works on pattern recognition, and it sure as heck knows when to give up.
So when you sit down and write, past instances of failure pound your brain. Then you freeze. Then you go and find yourself some chocolate to soothe your frazzled neurons.
But will you ever learn to write that way? Of course not, because the failure stems from a lack of direction; a lack of structure.
2) Structure forces the brain into pattern recognition
Structure? Yes structure.
Without structure, it’s impossible to identify elements. You see writers don’t just write. Their brain cells scurry around pulling instances of writing structure.
It seems like the person is simply writing, but in fact their brains are operating pretty much like a computer. It’s using data that’s been written to your brain over the years. And it’s pulling out that data and memories at high speed and turning it into structure.
Structure may sound boring.
It’s not. The most creative things in the world would not be around if it weren’t for structure.
The Taj Mahal, the Pyramids, a snowflake, Windows Vista—they’re all built on structure (okay, so Windows Vista has flaky structure, but that just underlines the point of this article).
The basis is structure. The rest is embellishment.
Which takes us to the third part: A mentor.
3) Mentor: Speeding up the process
A mentor is not critical. I can indeed give you a recipe. And you could follow the steps. And with a little bit of luck, you’d not only cook a great ‘chook’ curry (that’s chicken curry) but also experience immense success.
And if you got praise for that ‘chook’ curry, you’d do it again. And again. Thereby building up a success mechanism in your brain.
And yes, you may still be absolutely hopeless at baking muffins, your chicken curry is a sheer delight. Of course, if you have a mentor you’ll be making chicken curries with far fewer mistakes.
A mentor helps.
A mentor sees mistakes you’ve missed. A mentor is a catalyst—but hey, catalysts are just meant to speed up the process. The process, when properly explained will work regardless of the presence of the mentor. But if you’re in a hurry (and most of us are) then someone looking over our shoulders is kinda nice. And should we get stuck, it prevents us from going scurrying back to Pt 1: Failure.
Which takes us back to our struggle.
The struggle starts in your brain.
You have no fear when writing an email.
You know the structure of how to put together a few hundred words. You’ve probably even had a mentor in the form of a book, a course, or a school teacher that taught you how to write.
And so you write. Without fear or failure.
It’s this structure that drives consistent results time after time.
And that’s the core of writing.
To be able to get consistent results on demand.
Kaboom!
©2001-2008 Psychotactics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas?Find simple, yet electrifying ideas, on copywriting, public speaking, marketing strategies, sales conversion, psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com today and judge for yourself.
Santa Claus Inc. is well and profitable, right through recessions, depressions and just about any economic scenario. The reason why his marketing strategies work better than yours, is because he uses solid, dyed-in-the-wool psychology. He knows he doesn’t have to use new fangled techniques, when his simple marketing has stood the test of time.
If you don’t believe in Santa, you’d better change your mind, because the fat man from the north pole rocks on and you too can do the same if you stick to the basics. Find out if your product or service matches up by reading the article below.
Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle All the Way…
If you go to the heart of Santa’s marketing, the one word you come away with is ‘consistency’. Generation after generation have been exposed to one brand, one message, and the same powerful imagery.
Just like Mercedes own the term ‘luxury’ and Volvo owns the term ‘safety’, Santa owns the word ‘hope’. Every kid worth his Nintendo, hopes he’s got enough points on the goodness scale to justify a mountain of gifts.
Yet, most companies get tired of their own brand. They chop, change and pour thousands (if not millions) of dollars into a bottomless pit of mindless change. Take a look at McDonald’s advertising, for instance. McDonald’s own the word family outing yet their ads have been straying down the teenagerpath.
Does It Make Sense To Consistently Occupy One Niche?
You bet it does! Families go out with their kids to McDonalds. These kids sprout into budget-conscious teenagers that hang out at McDonalds. They have kids and grandkids and guess where they all end up. At the big yellow ‘M’, that’s where!
Santa doesn’t waver. His customers are kids. Like several marketers, he might have been sorely tempted to enter the gift market. With bad advice, he would have tried to get to teenagers, adults and everyone. Can you see the magic still working? Even the tiniest of niches is huge and niches have a way of expanding by themselves.
At the end of the day, it’s the consistency that takes the jingle all the way to the bank. Too many companies lose focus and give you seven reasons why you should buy from them. Santa sticks to one: Be a ‘good’ kid or you can keep hoping!
You Can Spot Him in the Middle of a Crowded Sky
Do you know anyone who comes to visit on a sleigh in the middle of the night? With reindeer and gifts? The reason why Santa stands out so vividly in our memories is because he’s different. The postman does the same thing, but leaves without the flourish.
It’s Really Important To Work Out How Your Marketing Message Differs
Santa’s core marketing term is not built solely on consistent branding but also on a very hard-nosed differentiation. Too much communication out there fits in with what’s safe. Customers have just one slot in their mind. You have to enter that slot at such an obtuse angle that they remember you for life.
Rose Richards runs Office Doctor. What sets her apart from all the rest of the administration crowd is the term, Small business pain relief. Can you imagine your reaction when you hear something like that?
The human mind is intensely curious and a marketing statement like that is pure bait. You want to know what pain relief she brings and how she goes about it-specially if you’re the one in pain. That’s only half the story. The construction of the message elevates her from simple number crunching to brain surgery and makes her unique.
If you want differentiation you need look no further than the guiding light of Santa’s sleigh– Rudolph, with his shiny nose. Can you even remember the names of the rest of the eight reindeer?
One very important point, however, is that the marketing message isn’t just different, but also customer-oriented. Rose takes the clutter out of administration and Rudolph provides a beacon for clearer navigation.
If you don’t have a benefit for the customer, just being different is going to get you nowhere.
Give and You Shall Receive
How many of you are out there networking like crazy? Trying desperately to fill in your steadily depleting bank reserves? You want, want, want! Take a look at Santa’s style.
He’s into giving first. If you probe deep into your mind, you’ll find the people you like best are those who have given you their time, their money or their knowledge. You trust them, and it’s very hard to say no when they ask you for a favor in return.
The deepest core of human emotions is fear. Every single product or service, without exception, is sold on the basis of a problem. The only known antidote to fear is TRUST. When trusts struts upwards, fear banishes itself to penguin land. The more you pile up the trust, the more you can do business.
Wouldn’t Santa be able to sell you just about anything? Would he be able to cross-sell and up-sell product? Santa could knock on your door next summer and you’d be more than happy to have him join your barbeque.
It’s up to you to build up the trust one Lego block at a time. Identify your clients and see what you can give them. It could be information, time or even a chocolate covered scrumptious cookie. It’s the old ‘What’s in it for me?‘ theory. If you can’t find something calorie-ridden for their minds or bodies, they won’t want to see you.
Play Santa. It works.
He Knows if You’ve Been Bad or Good…
Heck Santa knows his customers. He even knows when you are sleeping, or awake.
Then, there’s you. Look at your biggest customer. What’s her name? When is her birthday? Does she like Indian curries or sushi? In curries can she handle hot or medium? What does she think about you? What doesn’t she like?
You’re guessing for sure. You can’t be dead certain because you’ve been so busy looking at dollar signs that you’ve missed the plot completely.
The reason why Santa’s marketing works is because he intimately knows your individual needs. If you want a drum kit, you get one. If you want a Barbie, you don’t up sulking with a xylophone.
Santa knows because he’s interested in giving. To give, you have to know exactly what the receiver wants or your gift is not worth the packaging it’s wrapped in.
Some people worry about invading personal privacy. Hogwash! When was the last time you got upset because a supplier turned up with a big chocolate cake (your favorite) for your birthday? or with rare stamps for your son (because he loves collecting stamps)?
Santa’s invades our privacy gently and uses it to give, not to take. That’s why we don’t mind it. The tax department on the other hand, uses our information to take and therein lies the principal difference.
Once a Customer, Always a Customer
Santa Doesn’t Lose Customers. Period.
One of the primary reasons why he’s able to achieve this amazing feat is because he thinks of his customer’s customer. His customer is the kid, who in a few years gets a little wiser about Santa and his customer’s customer is the parent who has the amazing power to get their children to be nice notnaughty, if only for a short while.
Since the concept works in their favor, they do all the advertising. Without TV, radio or the Internet, Santa’s message gets a grip on millions of kids around the planet. These kids grow up and the marvel of Santa is handed down through the generations.
While It’s OK For Santa, How Would This Work In The Real World? Say, If You Sold Jeans.
Jeans West, a jean retailer, has several of the answers. I needed one pair, but Stephanie (the sales girl) sold me two–not by hassling me, but by gently reminding me I would get $20 off the second pair.
Then, with my purchase, she gave me a gift voucher of $10, for my use or to pass on. They, also signed me up for a loyalty program that offered to give me a 10% discount if I purchased over $250 worth of product in the next 6 months.
This Is Effectively What Jeans West Did to Make Me a Permanent Customer.
Step 2: She up-sold the product giving me good value for money.
Step 3: A gift voucher with a validity date, ensured an additional purchase. Or even better, the chance for me to pass it on to another person thus ‘creating a customer’ for Jeans West.
Step 4: Tying my fickle consumer head into a loyalty scheme. They wanted me to stay with them forever.
Santa’s steps may vary, but in essence he ties you into a solid loyalty program that is near impossible to get off. It’s ‘customer get customer’, rather than ‘advertising get customer.’ It’s cheaper and it works!
In conclusion here are the main points why Santa’s customers keeps coming back. These concepts may sound old, even trite, but have been proven time after time to work well. Test them against your company and brand to see where you can learn from the man from the North Pole.
1) Solid branding:We’re not talking lease here. Consistency is the key. This applies everywhere from networking meetings, advertising to any sort of communication that goes out. Keep hammering home the same unique message and put it up front. The weather changes all the time which is why we can’t trust it.
If you must change, it’s because your old message isn’t doing a complete job. I changed our first baseline from ‘Recession proof business principles’ to‘Reactivating dormant business clients.’
The proposition was the same but the second line got 10 times the response.
2) Differentiation:Santa knows he can be a courier with a difference. You, too, can create your own legend. Nike used Just Do It. Coke threw in the concept, Rum and Coke, indelibly burning the word classic into our consciousness. Sameness is in your mind. No matter how many brands exist on the market, your product has a fingerprint of its own. You just have to dig deep to find out.
3) Build trust by giving first.Life is all about sowing, then reaping-but sowing comes first. If you don’t give first, you will only get limited results. The more you stop thinking of yourself and focus on what the customer needs instead, the more you are trusted. Business is all about trust. If you don’t have it, you’re yesterday’s soup.
4) Know your customer… Like you know the hair on your head. Data collection and its optimum usage will get you right into their minds and keep you permanently rooted in. Every time they see you, they should think you are Santa coming to town.
5) Reactivate dormant clients They are all volcanoes. Sitting there with the power to erupt mightily. Figure out who they are and how you can work in tandem with them. Forget your product or service. That’s a given– It has to be good. Find out the ‘everything else’ factor and you will keep them for life.
Like Santa does…
———————————————————
©2001-2008 Psychotactics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas?Find simple, yet electrifying ideas, on copywriting, public speaking, marketing strategies, sales conversion, psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com today and judge for yourself.
A graphic designer spoke to me last week. His graphic design firm — let’s call it XYZ Design — was number one in designing labels for a large wine company. Let’s call that ABC Wines. Now ABC wines had some really super wines. They loved the incomparable graphic design of XYZ design, and continued to use them for several of their major brands. This one client alone generated tons of work and income for XYZ design right through the year.
Then It Happened…
ABC Wines sold out to another wine company. This new wine company had its own in-house graphic designers. That effectively meant XYZ Design’s income and work flow were severely hit, causing them to scramble for new clients to fill the gap.
“If only I had done what you said,” said the owner of XYZ Design, ” and not line extended into web design and other forms of graphic design and communication, I would have gone down the drain too”
Not true.
Line extension doesn’t mean you run just one business or have one product.
No, it doesn’t mean that at all.
Multi-tasking existed long before the advent of computers and the more skills you have, the better off you are in today’s world. However, you have to name each ‘twin’ differently to give it a very distinct identity. When you do that, your client recognizes the difference and chooses that ‘twin’ for its own individual personality and character.
How Do You Line Extend Without Line Extending
In the case of XYZ Design, it would have to work in this manner. To all wine companies, they would enter the door as a ‘wine label design Specialist.’ To every wine company in the country and overseas, they would be known, not as XYZ Design but more so, as XYZ Wine Design Specialists.’
This would give the wine companies a specialist to deal with. It would help XYZ Wine Design specialists to build their reputation in the wine industry to a point where if any wine company decided to design a label, XYZ Design would be one of the main contenders.
Now, wine companies don’t do just labels. They do brochures, leaflets, annual reports, websites and tons of other stuff. Your question would be, how can I afford to lose out on that market?
Why You Never Lose Out On The Rest Of The Stuff
It’s called backdoor entry. Everyone (including your competition) is banging on the front door, trying to get in. You, on the other hand, quietly slip in through the backdoor, pick your goodies and slip out.
This is how it works in practice. If you do really good work designing wine labels, it’s almost inevitable that clients will ask you if you can design other associated material. That’s when you introduce your other company, “JKL Graphic Design” and “PQR Web Design”. Same company, different positioning and certainly different brand names. What this does, is it helps clients compartmentalize their thinking. They now think you have specialist groups working on specialist projects taking extra special attention.
This Does Two Things…
1) It helps each of your businesses take on a ‘character’ of its own without affecting the other, much like Air New Zealand is premium and Freedom Air is budget. The public knows they’re one company but still compartmentalizes them into two. You can change the character of each company, and help boil it down to the smallest possible niche, making you an expert in the category.
2) The client sees your multiple brands as different brands. When they need web design services, or when they need to recommend them, they call the web design experts. And so on with graphic design and wine labels or just about anything that you are handling.
Everyone Loves A Specialist
Would you allow a GP to work on your triple bypass? OR would you prefer a heart specialist? Even better, a doctor who does only triple bypass surgery? If you feel the difference, so does your client and to ignore this basic human instinct is to do so at your own risk.
How It Works Not Just In Business But In The Workplace Too
If you’re working in a job, the same rule applies. Be known as a genius for something. Know how several things work. But branding yourself in one skill makes you the expert. Every time the company has a fire in that section, you will be known for your fire-fighting skills.
On an ordinary basis, most employees are not known for any particular skill and wonder why they are on top of the redundancy list. Bosses don’t know what you do and why you’re special, because you haven’t been doing the ‘branding bit’. It’s better to be a specialist than the ‘safe unknown.’
As Dire Straits sang in one of their songs, “Sitting on the fence is a dangerous course: You could get a bullet from the peace keeping force.”
Funny (But True) Phrases When You Forget To Obey The Rules
Jack of all trades, master of none. A bird in the hand, is worth two in the bush. And the best one of all: Keep it simple, stupid!
Keep putting these principles in action and you will see a marked improvement in your business.
©2001-2008 Psychotactics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas? Find simple, yet electrifying ideas, on copywriting, public speaking, marketing strategies, sales conversion, psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com today and judge for yourself.
Have you ever bought a house?
No sooner than you buy the house than the real estate refers you on to an insurance agent. And a lawyer. And assorted services.
In most cases, the real estate agent doesn’t get paid a commission for her referrals.
But the lawyer, insurance agent and the other assorted services refer their clients back to the real estate agent. And as a result, everyone’s super-busy. And they’re busy because they’re all alliances
of each other.
So yeah, it makes sense to have strategic alliances.
But not all businesses fit as neatly as real estate alliances. So how does a business owner get an alliance started? And how do you know if you’re succeeding in creating an alliance?
Um, you’ll need a benchmark.
So what’s the benchmark?
Do we get the alliance to promote our products?
Do we get them send out our articles?
Do we do simply wait, or bug the hell out of them?
You do none of the above.
Rushing in to get an alliance to promote your product is like meeting someone at a party, and then jumping into bed fifteen minutes later.
Rushing in to get them to send out articles, is like kissing someone eleven minutes after you’ve met them. Bugging them is not really designed to get results.
So what’s the goal?
The goal is start a conversation.
The goal is to keep that conversation going.
The goal is for you to keep that conversation going for long enough that the other person recognizes you on the ‘street’ and says hello.
That the other person gets your email and doesn’t trash it. That the other person gets a letter from you and doesn’t use it as toilet paper. That the other person gets a phone call from you and actually takes
it, or returns the call.
That’s the goal.
And this recognition comes from conversation.
You talk. They talk back.
You talk. They talk back.
You talk. They talk back.
No talk about jumping in bed quite yet. You’re just having coffee after coffee after coffee. That’s it.
These three coffees are critical. They’re the benchmark. They’re what gets the other person to know you and like you (in some way).
This is how you know you’re succeeding.
So the question arises: what should you do when drinking all that coffee?
You should be talking about ‘what you can offer’ the strategic alliance. The only real thing an alliance is interested in is what’s in it for them.
And you’re more than likely to have something that’s of value to two groups:
1) Their prospects.
2) Their existing clients.
It’s important to spend that caffeine time finding out how the alliance attracts prospective clients. Find out how they attract clients. Offer to give them a physical product or information
product ( I’ll call them goodies) that will help the alliance attract even more clients.
Then watch as your alliance’s ears perk up.
Notice how their eyes become less glazed.
This is because you’re talking about them, and not pushing your own product or service. In the same manner, you can ask how the alliance rewards existing clients.
In nine cases out of ten, the alliance will have no reward for existing clients at all. If you step in and provide something of value, then immediately the alliance is going to be interested.
Of course you’re smart enough to know that when the prospective or existing client gets the goodies, you’ll get access to a whole new audience.
The more generous you are, the more likely the alliance’s prospective or existing clients will have a look at your website, or try your product, or come to your seminar.
You’ve not only created an incentive for the alliance.
You’ve created an incentive for the alliance’s client.
And in doing so, created business for yourself.
So now you’ve downed enough coffee.
You’ve started a conversation.
How long before you get results?
It really depends.
Sometimes it takes a few weeks.
Sometimes it takes a few months.
Sometimes it may take years.
Keep drinking the coffees.
Keep talking, as long as you see that the potential alliance is worth the trouble. Because one day, they’ll accept the goodies you’re offering. And send those goodies to their clients.
And that’s the day you’ll open the floodgates to hundreds, even thousands of customers.
And it all starts with a simple coffee. Or two. Or two hundred.
And no, I don’t have any alliance with the cafe.
Not yet, at least 
©2001-2008 Psychotactics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas?Find simple, yet electrifying ideas, on copywriting, public speaking, marketing strategies, sales conversion, psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com today and judge for yourself.
Have you mistakenly trained your branding to fall over and play dead? Do you know how to use psychology to create branding that lights up with the voltage of a thousand neon bulbs? And can you play Scrooge with your budget, yet get huge branding mileage? And if so, how? Read on and find out how you can be a Leonardo Da Vinci with your brand!
It’s Raining 3000+ Messages a Day!
I have a friend. Let’s call him Eugene. Partly because that’s his real name. Eugene positions himself as a pitch manager. Very effectively, he shows CEO’s and executives (who make pitches for new and existing business) how they can use simple steps to get a powerful presentation across.
Eugene had a problem that all of us do. His brand (or his company’s brand) was just one of three thousand new messages that bamboozle us every day through various media. To get his name welded in his customer’s brain was like being on a rocking chair. You feel the movement, but you go nowhere. Eugene’s brand was going places, but it was a slow tedious process.
He needed to get some prime real estate in his customer’s brain really quickly and without the benefit of Daddy Warbucks? deep pockets. All he had to do was get their attention?
13 Boxes. Does That Get Your Attention?
Doesn’t your brain go nuts wanting to ask what is the significance of 13 boxes? That’s the new brand name of Eugene’s company. Can you see that immediately catching your attention? The brain is dying to know the significance of this strange sounding set of words. And it won’t let go till it gets an answer!
In this case the answer is simple. Eugene has a system of 13 boxes in his training process that takes you from the start of your presentation to the final crescendo. The 13 boxes form the structure and the route you must follow to get results.
His company brand could be something like XYZ Training or have his own name (like accountants and law firms do) but why on earth would that excite his customer’s brain?
Another Branding Example called KeyGhost…
Here’s another example of vivid psychological branding called KeyGhost. KeyGhost is a powerful but simplistic device that monitors every keystroke on your keyboard. This spy-like product evades the scrutiny of the unobservant eye. A name like KeyGhost immediately ruffles the brain forcing it to stop what it’s doing. Then it drives all its attention in the direction of this unusual sounding product.
This is exactly what you need. Once you’ve got a spotlight-hogging brand name, you start to own a tiny part of your customer’s brain that is yours to keep forever.
Forever Starts With a Trigger?
A trigger called Curiosity! Curiosity sounds a deafening red alert in every neuron of the brain. The brain is at its curious best when faced with something that seems irregular or uncommon in some way.
If your brand name doesn’t create a curiosity factor, you’re wasting gobs of money just trying to cut through the communication clutter. The sooner you get psychological exclamation marks into your brand name, the sooner you get the attention you crave for.
But What If You Have a Boring Company Name That You’re Stuck With?
Hey it happens! You inherited the brand name and there’s not much you can do with it without the shareholders going for your jugular. Well don’t fret. First you’ve got to realize that branding is not restricted to just your company name. A process/product that your company has or follows could become bigger than the company itself.
Look For The Power Of Your Processes?
With Eugene, his process was sitting under his nose all along. In the case of 13 Boxes, it’s quite easy to draw up a dramatic scenario of how 13 boxes can get you out of your box? and give you immense confidence in your presentation skills. In his case, though, the process actually defined the company.
With KeyGhost, it’s a cinch to describe how the hardware works just like a ghost and yet link it back to your keyboard and computer.
You can be an accounting firm with a company name like ‘Boring, Dead and Co.’ and still brand your prize-winning process and call it ‘Goodbye Extra Tax’ or ‘Corporate Loopholes.’
Do you think your clients will see you in a better light? You bet they will! So get going, get out and get working on your brand naming canvas right away!
Nonsensical Names Work Too?
One Red Dog, The Loaded Hog and other such names flout the basic principles of process and logic. Yet they seem to work powerful imagery on the brand name. It’s the story that goes with it that creates a sense of immortality and distinctiveness around the brand.
Even if you choose to have a name that means very little and can drum up a story to match it, you’ve got yourself a winner. Which place would you rather frequent? ‘One Red Dog’ or ‘Joe’s Cafe?’ With a vivid name you’ve got the opportunity to weave a story — even a story that you made up all by yourself!
Shazaam! It’s Branding With Drama!
Don’t just Mona Lisa your brand. Put some Shakespeare in it as well. Push the limits of your brand name and make it an action tool. For example, 13 boxes could be presented as 13 different boxes placed on a CEO’s desk. Can you visualize the curiosity factor? What if the boxes were different shapes and different colors? Can you see the website name? The T-shirt design? The ad on TV? Can you see how extendable a picturesque brand name can be?
Go ahead; make the effort to Mona Lisa your brand name.
You’ll make Leonardo really proud of you!
©2001-2008 Psychotactics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas? Find simple, yet electrifying ideas, on copywriting, public speaking, marketing strategies, sales conversion, psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com today and judge for yourself.
If you design kitchens, is another kitchen designer your competition? Most likely not. And the sooner you can position and modify your marketing strategy against your real competition, the sooner you will start to see more business come through the door.
So Who Really Is Your Competition?
The answer to that is always–Never the most obvious. So let’s take the example of the kitchen designer. Having decided that another kitchen designer isn’t his competition, he now has to decide who is his real competition.
His Real Competition Could Be A Car Salesman
Is this for real? How can a car salesman be a kitchen designer’s competition? Let’s analyze this more carefully. A kitchen and a car are both fighting for the same thing– The householder’s limited budget.
If the kitchen designer, were able to convince a couple that a kitchen is more important than a new car (which he could easily do if there was a foodie around), he now has a better chance of them dropping the car in favor of the kitchen.
The Advantage Of This Method Of Positioning
The most obvious advantage is that you’re not losing any current customers. All your past advertising is bringing in the customers that are looking for kitchens anyway.
What it does do however, is bring in a new lot of customers that would never have thought about kitchens, if you hadn’t implanted it in their minds. Effectively, you have both, customers who are looking for kitchens as well as customers who are forfeiting their new cars in favor of new kitchens.
How Your Re-Positioning Can Help You Focus
We had a client who ran a laundromat. Her current customers were people who did not have washing machines. Obviously, her business went up and down based on the season and on her customers limited budget. We got her to refocus her marketing strategy on a new target– Customers who had washing machines.
These customers had the money, but no time. By deciding that her real competition was time she decided to target people who had limited time instead.
As a result, she was now targeting busy people while other laundromats were targeting people with washing. This positioning actually helped the laundromat stand out from the rest of the competition.
How The Laundromat Did A Full 180
This re-positioning did a couple of things for them. One, it helped them focus on their target audience. Consequently, they changed their name from just XYZ Laundromat to Bizzie Buggers.
It was catchy and bang on target. It also now meant that busy customers (with the money), were more likely to stop over and drop their washing. Plus they had the regular customers walking through the door anyway.
What You Need To Do
Sit down and write who your immediate competition could be. Then write down what your business is really up against. Here are some examples.
These aren’t necessarily your right targets but they help you see things in a different light and help you determine who your real competition could possibly be.
Cartoonist= Photographer
Computer Salesman= Filing Cabinet
Car Dealer= Expensive Restaurant Meals
©2001-2008 Psychotactics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas? Find simple, yet electrifying ideas, on copywriting, public speaking, marketing strategies, sales conversion, psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com today and judge for yourself.
Imagine you take a trip to your post box down the road today to pick up the mail. To your surprise, you find nothing. Not one word. All you see is just an empty hole in the wall with zip in it. Annoyance would be the prime emotion here. Maybe even a dollop of disappointment.
But what if you find out that all that airy space exists simply because the post office decided to send all your mail back? Now that would get you in a bit of a boil, wouldn’t it? Frothing at the mouth, wouldn’t you want to tear all those bespectacled post office workers into little
vulture-sized meat bites?
And then what if I told you that your email marketing business is going the same way? What if you suddenly learned that the email newsletters you’d subscribed to are now doing the boomerang dance? What if you’re an email marketer and your subscriber isn’t even getting your mail? What if he’s just getting a stripped down version of it?
Is that smoke coming out of your ears?
The Wild West Lives Again!
In the Wild West the rules were simple. If I didn’t like you, I’d shoot you. Email isn’t dropping to the floor quite that quickly, but there is a definite pattern evolving that you should be aware of. Someone has put your email marketing on a poison drip, and by golly, if you ignore it, you’re one dead puppy! Read how Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are systematically working to weed out HTML mail and what you need to do to minimize your damage.
Who’s Paying for Whose Fault?
Spammers are the baddies, and spammers don’t care. Bandwidth can span the breadth and depth of the Grand Canyon and it won’t make any difference to them. You can be sure they’ll find a way to top it up with their junk. It was also obvious, even several years ago, that control of spammers was improbable. They know very well what they are doing. All they have to do is go to an offshore provider when anti-spam legislation is passed. What’s to stop them? As long as there is one country in the world that will allow spammers to send their poison, they will.
Does anyone really believe that every ISP on the network is going to spend the resources to closely examine the specific content of each and every large-scale email transmission to see if it’s okay or not?
The answer has to be no, since this doesn’t avoid the cost of spam in the long term. It simply transfers it from a cost of bandwidth to a cost of administration.
The harder commercial email pushes, the harder the network will respond by pushing back. “Big” email is a lame duck — and will soon be a stone cold dead one. Even with filters in place, my email account bulges with mail I didn’t ask for, and would never reply to. ISPs (Internet Service Providers) on the other hand, are watching this rainstorm with increasing concern. Every day, the volume of email threatens to blow the dam, and they’re not going to sit back and take it.
How an ISP’s Worry Becomes Your Headache
Bandwidth costs money. The more email you get and send, the more it’s costing your ISP. They can’t charge you more (or may not want to charge you), and so the easiest way out is to send your email à la Elvis: Return to sender!
The biggest offender here is HTML email that clogs up the system with a reasonable amount of imagery. It’s the graphics that generates business for you and me, but it’s also this very factor that is clogging up the pipe. This has led several ISPs to take some very radical decisions that border on telling you what you can and cannot read.
A Growing Menace Called Filters
Filters that are easy to implement seem to beat the system, so that’s the option that many ISPs consider first. In an attempt to control the traffic, they simply install cheap and nasty systems that send any mail that’s considered ‘spam’ right back to where it came from. This seems noble until you consider the following. These filters may be stopping legitimate mail from entering your mailbox.
If mom sent you a mail with a word which the filters pick up but don’t like: Bounce, bounce. It would go bouncing back! If you had the word ‘search engines’ in it, maybe they’d decide that word signified spam. Kaboom! It’s back to where it came from. Suddenly, your business that depends on the mail getting through is being vetted by an unasked police patrol run by goons. You’re not getting across to your customers, and even worse, your customers’ mail may not be reaching you.
What’s worse is that as an email marketer, you would tend to take for granted that you would get an “undeliverable” note when this happens. I understand it’s not always true; you can send out thousands of messages and remain blissfully ignorant of their eventual fate.
Why HTML-Based Marketing Will Be Easier To Kill
Macromedia Flash went through a fashionable phase and had to be dumped in favor of good ol’ HTML. HTML, while great on the web, is a pain in the neck in your inbox.
To counter this, many a software developer is seriously working out ways to have HTML-like effects within your email without the code and bandwidth that goes with it. This software, though available today, is quite expensive and not a very viable option except for larger companies. The rest of us have to contend with the inescapable fact that any email over a certain size will be treated as an HTML file and fair game for the intrepid filters to play ‘shoot the ducky.’
HTML will always be bulky, and is already denied or stripped by some carriers and destination ISPs, so it will always be a hazard. Some companies and email marketers have decided they are cutting out HTML altogether. It’s too much of a risk when you don’t even know whether it’s been dumped or stripped.
How Can You Go Past This ‘Doomsday Scenario’?
Two possibilities: text and online HTML.
Text is faster, and has stood the test of time. But it’s devoid of color and formatting — and more tedious to read. The better bet is to use HTML to link back to the website or online email newsletter. Businesses that get their customers trained to fetch their newsletter off the web will have fewer problems because they’ll have few occasions when they will have to send emails out to their customers — and then only very short notices or informative “drip feeds”.
The kind of email you would then send would rarely have the kind of signature that causes the spam filters to scream. Most of these filters are weighted, and there are very few stand-alone telltales that send email into instant oblivion.
My guess is that small emails, even if numerous, will escape filter security, because it requires a certain minimum amount of text to make a spam offer. Emails, smaller than this minimum will probably not be checked at all, owing to sheer volume.
The Hero Doesn’t Die In The End
The saddest part of this whole scenario is that people like you, me and a dog named Spammer are all trying to achieve the same thing — bulk up the profits. And in doing so, we are all part of the gloomy picture. But don’t despair.
Unlike you, Mr Spammer doesn’t want to be traceable. You do, because you’re legit. Make use of your legitimacy, and drive your customers back to your online newsletter or website.
And simultaneously drive the spam merchant out of business!
©2001-2008 Psychotactics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas? Find simple, yet electrifying ideas, on copywriting, public speaking, marketing strategies, sales conversion, psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com today and judge for yourself.
Are you afraid of alienating your customer with your marketing? Do you always feel like a stranger in their inbox? Do you have marketing strategies specifically designed to tell you when to keep marketing, and when to stop? Well, stop looking so puzzled. In the marketing article below, I’m going to bring home to you exactly how to join the dots. You will learn just how much to market, and when to stop. Yes, it is a science and marketing strategy, and it applies to online as well as offline marketing. So, pay close attention.
Why Dennis Was Fuming
Dennis McConnell was going nuts, literally. He sailed merrily into the office this morning only to find seven unsubscribe messages in his inbox. This was in response to an email he sent out marketing his upcoming Power Photoshop workshops. His merriness took instant flight. His mood transmogrified into the color of winter, and the sunshine outside didn’t seem to count for much. (Yes, it’s still summer in New Zealand!)
From Angry To Stupid In Twelve Minutes Flat
Like most marketers, Dennis spun around 180 degrees. He pulled the plug on his marketing and decided to send even fewer emails to his subscribers. Why anger them, he thought? The longer he thought about it, the deeper he swam into his turgid pool of fear.
That Is, Was, And Will Be His Big Mistake — And Yours Too!
Why? Let me paint an alternate scenario for you. Imagine you had to give a speech to a hundred people. Say the speech was at the end of the day, and the participants were now tired. Let’s suppose about thirty of them left. Would you give the speech or start crying for mommy, because those thirty walked out?
Without question, you’d still give a stupendous speech, wouldn’t you? Your job is not to focus on the people who are leaving, but on those who have stayed to listen to you.
Dennis was like every one of us. He paid attention to the exit, forgetting there were hundreds of people who were quite happy to receive the information. Are you doing the same? Are you focusing on the goodbyes, when in reality you should focus on those who are sitting tight? Do you even understand the psychology of how people react, when they don’t want to do business with you?
The Psychological Difference Between Unsubscribers And Complainers
Why do people complain? Have you even thought about it? The only time people complain is when they DON’T want to leave. Complaining is their way of communicating to you to spruce up your act.
Unsubscribers, on the other hand are mostly either freeloaders (they came on because you offered something free), or they recognized themselves not to be your target audience. You are never, ever, not in a million years, going to sell them anything. They are just keeping you from wasting your time with them. Understand this concept and you are on first base, but wait…we still have to get to second base.
Second Base Comes Before First Base
Look at mum. When she told you to take the garbage out, you complained. But did you ever unsubscribe? You didn’t unsubscribe from mum because she was putting food on your plate. If you knew what was good for that bottomless pit you called your stomach, you’d stick close to home. It’s exactly the same with your customers. If you consistently give them information that is useful to them, they will stick with you through all the marketing messages you send them. Heck, they’ll even buy!
Don’t Be A Bloomin’ Miser With Your Information
You see this article. It’s not a couple of scraps that fell off the table. It is the full story. Every plot, every twist and turn. That’s what has kept you reading so long. If you send out information that’s half-baked, you get half-baked subscribers. You’ve heard the saying, ‘Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.’
Most advertising is fluff. Most marketing tells an incomplete story. And most articles on the Internet actually edit for space. If you were selling a product, where would you stop your sales pitch? Would you count the words and say, stop at 300 words? Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? So why is it different when you’re selling a concept? (At this point, you’ve read 718 words and are still reading. Doesn’t that prove the point?)
So How Much Do You Give?
Lots and then when you’re done, heap some more on the top. Would you be happy if I left half the questions unanswered in this article? As an expert in your field, you’re way ahead of your customer. Knowledge grows in leaps and bounds. Why not give it away? Give away tons of the stuff, and you will find within yourself, an unending reservoir of information. If you give away loads, it means you have a lot more. Inevitably, customers will see that and actually pay to learn more from you.
To market to your customer, you must be a brand in their heads. And to be a brand, you must earn their respect. The only way you can do that is to give them the full dope.
Ask mum. How many recipes did she give away? Would you live long enough to see the end of the recipe list, even if you lived to be a hundred? Is she the goddess of recipes, or what?
The Curse Of The Unsubscribe
Sales is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another. Say that out loud. Most marketing doesn’t have enough What’s- in- it- for-me factor. Most of it has no enthusiasm, and looks like it was written by someone who speaks Greek as a first language.
If your marketing, advertising or sales pitch is boring, your customer yawns. Several yawns later they leave, unsubscribe or make you a permanent resident on their delete list. If you cannot be enthusiastic in the medium you choose to market, get a professional to do your marketing. This is your bread and butter, don’t muck around with it.
It’s Mindless Marketing Without Technology
Some customers jump ship because you aren’t smart enough to use technology. Too many times, right after a client has attended a workshop, you sell them the same workshop again. How dumb is that? And dumber still is the fact that most people will try to work their lists by physically removing the names.
You cannot afford to make mistakes here. Invest in software that filters through the mess and does it flawlessly, instead of you picking at names one by one on your list. This eliminates mistakes and gives you a clean list to market to. Ergo, customers aren’t mad, and your bank account is jingling away.
Customers Are Waiting To Be Led
Don’t let the Unsubscribers worry you. Customers want to improve their lives, their businesses and their careers. If you believe you can do that, tread the intelligent road by educating them in great detail.
Put in all the goodies to make your customers stay. If they’re sick and tired of you, they’ll complain. They’ll say NO. Till then, you keep on marketing to them.
It’s that simple.
©2001-2008 Psychotactics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas? Find simple, yet electrifying ideas, on copywriting, public speaking, marketing strategies, sales conversion, psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com today and judge for yourself.
Technology rules. Yeah, for about five minutes–then natural instincts take over. Are you stupid enough to fight Mamma Nature? Well go ahead and rewrite the rules if you can, cause the Big Mamma knows one thing. She’s tried and tested it all. And if you want to play by her kooky rules, she is willing to teach you a thing or two.
The question is, are you willing to learn?
Do You Pay in Advance?
Have you noticed how big a brand Red Bull is today? Or how insignificant their advertising is? Red Bull shuns print advertising and has never done a triple back flip on a web campaign. Yet, it has found roots in over 50 countries. And has cemented its loyalty in the fickle land of teenagers.
So what’s Red Bull’s big secret?
It’s called GIVING.
Their marketing strategy was simple. They enticed students with free cases of Red Bull, if they threw a party. Guess how many students need an excuse to have a party? With a simple act of giving away free cases to the right target audience in the right universities, Red Bull became a very rich Red Bull.
Yet Where Are Most Marketing Plans Aimed?
Too often marketing is aimed solely at GETTING. Look at all those marketing plans, those many advertisements blaring away on the radio and TV. It’s get, get — all the time!
Yet, nature pooh pooh’s the stuff. Putting a carrot (not cart) before the horse, nature works on the giving part first. In its own little marketing and advertising way, a flower works contrary to most marketers. Using the bait of color and nectar, it draws the bees, knowing full well that its very existence depends on giving bees what they want first, so the bees will carry their pollen.
Wander down the supermarket aisle and you’ll see what I mean. Fifty thousand brands stare at you, screaming at you to buy them. Then a little ol’ lady offers you a sample of a product. Fifteen seconds into your tasting session, she gives you another sample. Then, for no apparent reason, a bottle or two of the product finds itself in your cart. Were you sold? You betcha!
Giving works for a simple reason. Nature hates imbalance. If the deer get faster, so do the cheetahs. It’s a classic system to keep things in balance. Which effectively means that to create an imbalance in marketing in your favor, you’ve got to give first.
Are You Ready To Do the 1-2-3 and Cha-Cha-Cha?
Do you play the dating game? Or do you rush in to conquer most of the time? Mamma Nature knows that haste makes waste. Yet marketers think nothing of blowing billions of dollars on various hare-brained, get-rich-quick schemes that achieve far less than their potential.
Here’s an example. Harley Davidson has been to hog hell and back. Just in time to save its bacon, it decided to work on the cha-cha-cha instead of the wham, bam method. The reward has manifested itself in thousands of die-hard Harley fans that would go all the way on their Harleys. Even today, despite being in an enviable position, Harley still finds time to wine and dine its customers while thumbing its nose at traditional media.
Another good example of cha-cha-cha marketing is how the British operated in the 19th century. Instead of slamming their way into conquering new lands, they went as traders. Whether history likes it or not, they maximized their potential in a systematic and natural marketing manner.
What Happens When Nature Goofs Up
Even nature loses out when it fails to obey its own rules. As long as it sticks to its spring, summer, autumn, winter routine, we go along with the “relationship.” Yet every time it does the 60-second prime time TV spot on us, we absolutely hate it. Oh sure, there’s great color, drama and pizzazz in a whirling tornado, but there’s zero empathy and a whole lot of defiance.
Turn on the music, move those feet. This isn’t some behemoth CRM program we’re talking about. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but flowers arouse less suspicion. Do the cha-cha-cha and the getting to know your customer. It’s cheaper, it follows steps, and it works.
Is Your Target Audience “Everyone?”
Nature would laugh at you and laugh heartily. Are you setting yourself up for disaster or what? Even a pimple-ridden 13 year old knows exactly who her knight in shining armor is. While the concept of being in the company of 20 gorgeous men would set her eyes alight, her brain knows better.
Yet most businesses horrify the heck out of Nature. In an apparent suicidal move, they go after a general audience in order to maximize their returns. Some of the biggest brands today are built on single-minded focus. Mercedes, Volvo, Rolex, McDonalds, Red Bull and Playboy all have a clearly defined target audience.
If you doubt it, take a look at a wild dog attack on a National Geographic broadcast. Have you noticed the focus and strategy of their attack? They single out the prey and go after it in a pre-defined relay system. It gets results, and isn’t that what you want?
Cotta Keep on Dancing
When was the last time your heart stopped beating? And isn’t that good, because if it did, you’d be taking harp lessons in a big hurry. Nature doesn’t stop its marketing campaign and neither should you. The first thing businesses do when the economy takes a downturn is pull the plug on marketing. Fat good that’s going to do you! That’s like telling your heart to work at half the heart beats when things aren’t good.
The planet doesn’t stop rotating, the trees don’t stop growing and the fish don’t stop swimming. Yet in an absolute violation of the most basic law of nature, we stop and start like some trainee driver.
There Ain’t No One Like Me!
Nature doesn’t brand-extend. It creates something and then it throws away the mould. When it creates a product, it makes sure that product thrives, grows and multiplies. It adds color, shape and size for a bountiful variety, but brand extension is a no-no.
Yet look at some of the biggies out there. They put out their brands and then put their names on everything from computers to soap. Dove still stands for soap with 1/4th moisturizing cream. Yet, in the supermarket, Dove tries to take on the full force of nature by brand-extending.
Does it work? Yes and no. People have too much clutter in their heads already. To add to that clutter is asking for trouble. Our brains identify with one object when we are given a name.
From Nokia to Chimpanzee
When I say Nokia, you say mobile phone. Yet Nokia sold everything from gumboots to computers — even TV sets. Then one day it dawned on them that they could conquer the world with a brand name that stood for one thing and one thing alone.
Sure a chimpanzee and a baboon are both monkeys, but they’re essentially different products. You won’t find a chimpanzee light or a chimpanzee diet in the species. They’re either chimps or they’re baboons! Besides, their unique brand name allows you to identify them with zero confusion every time! Uniqueness is your brand’s birthright. Use it well.
Here are some “Au Natural” guidelines to business and marketing strategy:
1) Pay in Advance: First you shall sow, and then you shall reap. And you must sow in fertile ground not on rocky soil. Give, and you shall receive. Does this all sound familiar? Are you giving away anything worthwhile on your website, through your advertising, in your brochures?
2) Do the dance one step at a time: You’ll just make a fool of yourself if you don’t build up your reputation with your customers. Give them the best you possibly can. When nature puts on a beautiful butterfly, it starts with a worm.
3) Put on the glasses: Get focus in your life because Nature will make sure you pay big time if you don’t. Sure you can get business, but think of what’s possible if you focus. A l
ittle focus right now reaps long-term rewards. It’s your choice.
4) She’s only happy when she’s dancing: Is that a Bryan Adams song? Or is Nature telling us what we should be doing? She’s on the floor. Go on and boogie.
5) And then there was one: Is your fingerprint different? Is your iris different? Do you have a clone? Nature doesn’t think it works in real life. Why do you think differently?
6) And finally: Take off your headphones and look at what nature is saying.
It’s showing you the color of money!
©2001-2008 Psychotactics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas? Find simple, yet electrifying ideas, on copywriting, public speaking, marketing strategies, sales conversion, psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com today and judge for yourself.