Airports, restaurants, online stores and police stations often have the same challenge: they don’t deal with regulars. A lot of the time, people are walking in the for the first time.
If it’s an experience that’s fairly common, human beings are very good at looking for clues about where to go for more information or to get started. That tall desk in the back of the drugstore probably has a pharmacist behind it…
Often, though, especially in international travel or new experiences or emotional events, we just don’t know. So why not make it easy?
Be obvious about it. A sign that says First Time Here in three or four languages is a fine place to start. You can explain that while you serve minestrone, the locals come for the gumbo. Or that you should keep that little tag from the customs form cause you’ll need it when you pick up your luggage.
Sure, not everyone is going to read that page on your menu or press that button on your voicemail, but your smartest and often loudest prospects will. And that’s who you most want to persuade. (PS Richard has a plugin that does this for WordPress users.)
July 3, 2007
Here’s what most retailers do:
They organize by brand/designer or label
Within that, they organize by type of item
and within that, by style
and finally, by size
So, all the Armani blue suits are next to each other, then by size.
So, all the boxer shorts at the Gap are on a wall, organized by style first (checks over here, stripes over there,) then by size.
So, all the power tools at Home Depot are together, sometimes by brand, sometimes by function (saw) and then by type of material to be cut (wood).
This is dumb, and the web makes it obvious why it’s dumb. It’s dumb because it makes it easier for the clerk, not for the customer. And dumb because it plays to the label’s ego, not to ours.
Does anyone say, "okay, even though my son wears size large boxers, these striped ones are really nice, I’ll buy the small instead." Of course not.
So why not put all the large boxers right next to each other, regardless of designer and style?
When you go to Home Depot to get what you need to build something out of wood, why don’t you find the glue and the wood saws and the screwdrivers and the screws all together in a section called, "working with wood"?
It’s pretty simple: if you want to sell belts and socks and even shoes, you need to sell a suit first. Make it easy to add on, and people will do it, quite happily.
July 2, 2007
One of the most difficult transitions that marketing organizations go through is shifting from pushing against resistance to running with acceptance.
The culture at insurgent companies is all about pushing. You get turned down on sales calls, you have tiny market share, people walk away from your trade show booths. You have trouble finding suppliers and a bank loan and even employees.
So you learn to push. In fact, you may discover you start to lean against that resistance, that it becomes part of who you and your team are.
If your work is successful, you break through. You become Apple or the politician who leads in the polls. And then what?
If you’re very good, you start running like crazy. You have the wind at your back and the chance to dramatically increase your impact and market share. But most organizations keep pushing. Because that’s what they know how to do. Instead of running up the scoreboard, they look for something else to push against. I think the fascinating transformation at Apple is worth noting. The iPod gave them the opportunity to start running.
It’s not easy.
July 1, 2007
Marketing with fear is a powerful tool. Fear is a universal emotion, it’s viral and people will go to great lengths to make it go away.
Some items can’t be marketed without fear. Seat belts, for example. They’re not convenient, good tasting, fun to use or profitable. Fear works great in this case.
An essential question to ask, though, is who benefits? In the case of seat belts, the use of fear directly benefits the prospect, because using seat belts not only decreases fear (peace of mind) but improves safety. It gets a little dicier if you’re selling a placebo–increasing peace of mind without increasing safety (a $30 warranty at the cash register for a $16 item is not a smart financial investment, though it may help you sleep better.)
What if the marketer not only doesn’t create peace of mind, but intentionally destroys it for his own benefit? Sometimes, fear is used as a marketing tactic even if it doesn’t benefit the prospect at all. That’s because news organizations like CNN and various organizations and politicians can benefit. Craig sends us this photo of a convenience store hoping that fear will sell some duct tape.
Without terror, you can’t have terrorism.
June 30, 2007
Traveling yesterday, I realized that there are two popular strategies for service delivery. One is a coping strategy and one is a marketing strategy.
You can deliver the lowest permitted amount, or you can work to create the most remarkable experience you can imagine.
Stop for a second before jumping to the conclusion that the latter is always what you do.
When I pay a bill, I don’t put more money in the envelope than I’m billed for. And I don’t put more stamps on the envelope than the USPS requires, even if I’m in a particularly generous mood. Living life like Spinal Tap (always at 11) is inefficient if not impossible. Very often, we find ourselves doing the least amount of work permitted because, after all, we have more important things to spend our time on.
Smart marketers understand two things. The first is that you must pick your battles, deciding in which areas ‘most’ matters and living with ‘least’ the rest of the time. The second contradicts that and makes this a lot more complex: Least spreads.
You’ve seen this in countless organizations. A few people get in the habit of least, then a whole department does, and the next thing you know, it’s an entire airline. Least is contagious.
Really smart marketers understand this: the best way to fight the contagion is to pay what it costs to eliminate least everywhere you look. It’s ridiculous to expect most in all things (your postage bill will get out of hand), but I think it”s possible to work to stamp out least.
June 29, 2007
Given the mass hysteria, it’s probably not so good to be Denny Strigl this week. He’s the COO at Verizon quoted with pride about turning down the iPhone deal (Verizon turned down iPhone’s advances.)
The reason you need to care about this: Almost everyone is like Denny.
Most innovative business people who dream of bizdev imagine that they can be just like Steve Jobs. Come up with a super idea, a useful service, a great gizmo and go to an industry leader. Sign lots of NDAs and go to lots of meetings. Demand that they change their ways in order to make your wonderful innovation a game changer, something that will fix their broken industry and make you both a lot of money.
Hey, Steve Jobs himself couldn’t do it at Verizon. The list of big companies that didn’t jump on game changing ideas is huge. Almost as long as the list of great companies you didn’t buy stock in when you had the chance.
The iPhone/AT&T deal is almost certainly the exception that proves Godin’s law of bizdev: No is the default answer. The spreadsheets and the marketing team and the CFO and the lawyers have no trouble at all defending the status quo, because, it’s their status quo. They created it and they like it that way. Bizdev deals like this almost always fail because the potential for upside seems too small compared to the mammoth disruption that organizations imagine will beset them.
Plan on going under, over or around instead.
June 28, 2007
…who don’t necessarily know the web as well as you do. Mark Fraunfelder of boingboing wrote it and it’s really useful. I built a lens about it: RuleTheWeb on Squidoo. When you find a useful link in the book, go ahead and add it to my list.
Doug points us to: Verizon to prospective iPhone buyers: ‘Stay near a plug’.
It’s basically a memo designed to help Verizon reps denigrate the iPhone. I think this is bad marketing. If someone is going to switch carriers and you’ve done your best to denigrate their choice, you’ve not only lost a customer, you’ve also lost credibility and respect going forward. (Because your criticism of the phone is also criticism of my judgment.)
What I’d try instead? How about this:
"The iPhone will cost $500, plus a new battery next year, plus $50 a month. If you spent that money with Verizon, you could have x, y and z…"
Then I’d spend the rest of the conversation selling x, y and z. I’d talk about a superfast network and a more reliable coverage area and all the cool gimmicks and features in the phone I can buy for $350… (Remember, before now, all you could talk about was cheap phones, not great ones. Apple raises the ceiling).
The iPhone is a gift for every cell phone marketer in the world. Why? Because it creates a problem where there was none before. Now, a cell phone is not just a phone. Now, a phone is worth spending money on. So, since Apple created that ‘problem’ in my mind, how are you going to solve it?
June 27, 2007
One popular method is to make a dollar in profit from each of a million people. Or a penny from a hundred million. This is the China strategy. It almost never works.
It almost never works because the challenge of reaching that many people is just too great. It’s too risky and too expensive. Doesn’t matter that you’re only hoping for a dollar or a penny. The price isn’t the challenge, it’s the difficulty in spreading your idea.
Far easier to make a thousand dollars from each of a thousand people, or even $10,000 from a hundred organizations. You can focus on a small hive of people, a group that talks to itself. You can push through a smaller dip and reach a level of recommendation and dominance that makes incremental sales far easier.
And you can learn much earlier in the process if you’ve gotten it right or not. Because you’re making more per sale, you can spend the time necessary to figure out what really sells and modify your offering sooner in the process.
The irony is that many products and services that have reached huge masses of people actually have significant margins (Windows, for example, or a cup of Starbucks). They got the best of both worlds because first they focused on winning small communities over and that led to the larger market.
June 26, 2007
Why doesn’t Puma or Adidas (or even Nike) pay the management of the SF Giants to bench Barry Bonds before he hits the record? Now you’d have a brand that really stood for something.
Why don’t local businesses buy $50 worth of quarters now and then and feed all the meters in town… just put a little flyer under the windshield wiper.
Once you change the rules, the sponsorship opportunities are endless.
[Brandon has a warning, though, for anyone thinking about parking meters.]
