Influential Marketing Blog

Could You Sell A Pumpkin In August?

There is a moment when everyone does the same thing. Right around the 4^th of July, most people will buy fireworks. And April 15^th is one of the universally dreaded days of the year in the US, where millions of Americans seek help to file their taxes. And in the days before Halloween, everyone buys a pumpkin. The point is, many purchase behaviours are ruled by the principle of peak moments which define our activities.

As small business owners, chances are you have figured out the peak behaviours for your customers and are doing the same things that many of your competitors are doing. Whether that means staying open late around the winter holiday season or creating seasonal promotions, marketing to customers at a peak moment is a necessity of business – and most of us have a plan for it.

How much are you doing, however, to actively focus on marketing to your customers during off-peak moments? Today you can purchase washing machines with timers so they will wash your clothes during the night when water costs are lower – but few other aspects of our lives allow us to appreciate the potential of off-peak activities. In general, we live in a world where the power of off-peak activities are under-appreciated.

What if you owned the nightclub that only opened at midnight and stayed open until 6AM? Or the only movie theater to have breakfast film showings – at 7am?  Or you had the only dentistry with evening office hours? This is not only about timing either.

Thinking off peak means more than selling a Turkey during Thanksgiving. How about focusing on selling tickets for holiday packages the day after a long weekend so you can target all those customers who saw their friends go away for the weekend and wished they had as well? Or promoting a house to sell during a relatively unpopular buying time during the school year?

As more and more small businesses feel the pinch to conserve their marketing dollars, your competitors are more likely than ever to only have a marketing strategy focused on the peak moments for your industry. As a result, thinking off peak can not only help you reach customers and potential customers in unexpected ways, it can also help you to focus more marketing effort on a moment that your competitors are ignoring completely.

Toyota Venza Reminds Us Of The Dangers Of Evangelism

If there is one universal truth that almost no one in the world of technology or social media has figured out, it might be this: everyone hates evangelists. No matter what they are "evangelizing" - the world view anyone who claims this title for themselves usually has is that the product, service or idea that they have to share with the world is one that everyone should adopt. Evangelists don't see the world as it is - they see it as a place that would be better if only more people agreed with them.

That kind of one-sided thinking is dangerous, whether for joining Facebook, adopting a religion, buying an iPad or anything else. I found an unlikely reminder of this several days ago through a brilliant ad for the Toyota Venza which pits an active middle aged couple against their teenage social media obsessed daughter. As they go out into the world and enjoy their lives, their daughter laments about how "anti-social" they are and calls their 19 friends on Facebook "so sad." Check it out:



How many times might any "social media enthuasiast" find ourselves in exactly that same position? In the ad, the daughter (played perfectly by Allyn Rachel - @allynrachel on Twitter) is an evangelist for a technology that her parents are managing to do just fine without. For me, the ad stood out as a rare reminder that there is a hidden cost to our growing culture of evangelists. As marketers work to build "brand ambassadors" and ordinary customers find pleasure (and sometimes revenue) in becoming the unofficial voices for brands - there will be a coming backlash against those who are overly evangelical.

So instead of so much dueling evangelism, what if each of us just focused on ourselves instead of "converting" others to our point of view?   In an ideal world, people should always feel free to share their passion about the things they love ... as long as we all don't have to agree on what those things are.

The Wingtip Vortex

Anyone who has ever taken flight lessons knows about a problem called the wingtip vortex. Described online as “the twin tornadoes formed by the difference between the pressure on the upper and lower surfaces of an airplane’s wing” – the wingtip vortex actually creates quite a dangerous situation for any plane because if you fly too close to a plane in front of you, you could get caught in this twin tornado and lose control of your aircraft. When it comes to commercial flight, it is the wingtip vortex keeping flights from landing closer together, which would speed up landings and takeoffs – helping with the new crushing volume of flights happening right now.

As it turned out, an engineer from NASA back in the 60s had already pioneered a simple solution to this problem which no one was using because it seemed too complicated to implement on already built aircraft. He demonstrated that by turning the end of a wing up in a vertical direction, you could reduce the wingtip vortex to almost nothing. More importantly, turning the wing in this direction made flying vastly more fuel efficient. As fuel prices spiked dramatically in the 90s, domestic airline carriers refitted thousands of aircraft with these vertically turned “winglets” to take advantage of the new design.

What does the story of the winglet have to do with your small business? It is a reminder that sometimes a simple and obvious solution can streamline how you operate, save you money and perhaps even reinvent your entire industry. Winglets in business can come from anywhere. They can be a pioneering new business model like what eBay had when they created a website and anyone could name the price that they were willing to pay for anything, and the seller would decide whether to accept it.

James Dyson created a winglet  when he imagined a new vacuum cleaner which provided better suction and operated without the bags. Sometimes winglets are hard to think about because they often solve problems that people have learned to live with. Pilots had been compensating for the wingtip vortex for decades. Vacuum manufacturers were happy with the status quo of making their money on the replaceable bags and consumers didn’t know any better.

The real challenge for any of us is to find enough time to step back enough from the day to day pressure of running our businesses to think about where our own winglets might be. My challenge to you is to try and find the time to do it … because the impact to your small business could be huge.

This post is republished from the original article I wrote for the American Express Open Forum website. It is part of "Small Business Friday" on this blog - a featured series on ideas and marketing techniques for small businesses.

To read more articles like this, visit the "Small Business Friday" category on this blog.

Why The Best Global Ideas Might Be "Proudly Found Elsewhere"

A few weeks ago, the Cannes Creative Festival brought together thousands of practitioners in every discipline of marketing and advertising to honor the best communications campaigns and thinking from the previous year.  As a marketing writer and strategist, I spend a lot of time thinking about original examples of great marketing. Good ideas are inspirations.

In particular, I love to find examples from outside of the US - as when I go and speak internationally, it is usually important to have examples from many different regions of the world. These examples are more than just global eye candy, however. They are often ideas that worked in one region, but have been untried in another. It led me to a simple thought and question:

What if every global organization got better at "transplanting" their best ideas from region to region?

To be clear, I am not suggesting just taking an exact idea and trying to replicate it in a new culture.  But after applying cultural insight to global thinking, couldn't it be better used  as inspiration for work in another?

The reason more brands don't do this usually has nothing to do with efficiency or with cultural insights. What stands in the way of this, typically, is ego. No marketing manager wants to admit that they are reusing an idea from a colleague, and agencies are not paid to recreate an idea that worked elsewhere - they are incentivized to create their own ideas.

This "not invented here" syndrome goes far beyond marketing - and it causes scientific research groups to recreate experiments, nonprofits to make the same mistakes over and over (or even unintentionally compete with one another for attention) and leads to redundancy in many other organizations. We all have a natural attachment to our own ideas - but the greatest missed opportunities might just come from those ideas that we dismiss simply because they aren't ours.

The future of many businesses and industries depends on putting this sort of thinking aside. Collaboration isn't just about solving problems. It can also be able taking the best ideas from one part of the world and helping to transplant them into another. The rising term for this type of thinking is a new buzzword and acronym: PFE or "Proudly Found Elsewhere." Perhaps what more global organizations need is someone who is definitively in charge of finding things elsewhere and transplanting the best ideas across an organization. This could easily become the job of the Content Curator, a role I suggested might be one of the social media jobs of the future.

The most successful global organizations are the ones who can embrace the concept of finding their next big ideas elsewhere. The surprising fact is that "elsewhere" may be closer to home than they think.

4 Easy Ways To Share Your Expertise Online

Expertise is a beautiful thing when you are a small business. If you are in the right business, you have probably spent a long time building your expertise in whatever your industry happens to be. Whether you provide consultative services for your customers, or use your expertise to help sell retail products – the expertise can be what sets your business apart.

Unless you are in a web-related business, though, chances are you don’t necessarily think about how to use your expertise online. When you do, it can be a great way of building the overall reputation for your small business and bringing more customers through your doors to work with you because of the expertise that they have experienced a small piece of online. So assuming you have some expertise, but need a nudge to help using it effectively online, here are a few ideas for how to do it.

1. Proactively answer questions. There are more and more ways for people to ask questions about nearly any subject today. LinkedIn Answers is popular with professional audiences who ask questions to their own networks. Facebook status updates and tweets on Twitter often include people seeking other’s opinions or experiences. Finally, social answering sites like Quora are getting a lot of buzz right now because they let people ask questions to a crowd and then bring answers together. Each of these is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your expertise. To do it, just create an account (if you don’t already have one) with four sites to start; Facebook, Quora, Twitter and LinkedIn. Then search for relevant questions that relate to your business and try to make it a point to answer 1-2 questions per day based on your expertise. Over a span of time, the quality of your answers will bring people to your site and your small business.
2. Create a “how to” video. Several studies have shown recently that one of the most popular phrases searched for on YouTube or Google is “how to.” That means that if you want your video to be found by the most people, make sure you use the words “how to” in the title of the video. In terms of the content for the video, think about some of the questions you most commonly get from your customers or things that people often wonder about when considering who to work with. For example, if you have a Dental practice, a good video could be “how to choose a great dentist.” The videos that address a big question that many consumers are likely to have are the ones that will ultimately get the most views and be seen as the most useful. Then make sure it is easy for anyone watching the video to learn more about your business and your expertise.
3. Be a guest contributor/author. There are already key media sources that people are going to in order to learn more about topics that relate to your business. Instead of always trying to compete with these, consider how you might get featured on a relevant site so you can share your expertise with a built-in audience. For this to work best, you need to think in terms of a freelance writer. What topic would the maximum people be interested in reading about that fits your expertise? Is it topical and relevant to what is happening in the world right now? What makes you the best person to write this piece? Once you can answer these questions, you can approach the manager/editor of any site online and offer to create a guest contributed article for their site. Volunteer to do it without payment, give them an idea of the topic you would cover, and share a bit about your background and why you’re qualified to write that piece. As long as it is clear your piece won’t be overly promotional, you would be surprised how often site managers would be willing to publish content like this – and it can do wonders for your reputation.
4. Publish an evergreen “content bomb.” One of my favourite terms in the world of blogging is what I call a “content bomb.” This is essentially a piece of content that can act as a land mine (but in a good way). It will sit online for days or months or years, but when someone searches for something relevant to it, they will uncover this piece of content and it will address their question while also demonstrating a deep level of expertise on the part of the writer. Good examples of this are 2-3 page PDFs, eBooks, topical blog posts, or videos. This content can be anything you like, and it can be posted on your own website or through a third party site. Either way, choosing the topic is the most important thing – and it needs to be something that people always want to know about.

This post is republished from the original article I wrote for the American Express Open Forum website. It is part of "Small Business Friday" on this blog - a featured series on ideas and marketing techniques for small businesses.

To read more articles like this, visit the "Small Business Friday" category on this blog.

The Marketing Truth Which Surprised Mark Zuckerberg

The first time that brands were ever allowed on Facebook, the only way they could advertise was by offering a specific promotion. No brand awareness campaigns or focus on engagement ... just a simple offer. It was a symbol of how Facebook (and Mark Zuckerberg in particular) saw brands entering into the previously sacred space of the Facebook social network in the early days. Brands were once a necessary evil, something that had to be endured so Facebook would be able to continue to pay the bills and pay back all their VC investors. 

Fast forward several years and you will really appreciate this stunning statistic - the "Like button" is clicked a total of 91 million times every month. And many of those clicks are for brand sponsored pages. Earlier this week I was lucky enough to be invited to attend and speak at Intel's internal conference focused on social media. More than 125 social media pioneers from within Intel came from around the world to participate, and one of the speakers was Aimee Westbrook from Facebook. Among the many interesting facts about brands working with Facebook that she shared was this data point which should make any marketer sit up in their chair: 50% of all the people on Facebook have clicked the "Like" button on a brand page in the last 30 days.

It was thanks to this affinity that more and more people are sharing around connecting with brands they like that Mark Zuckerberg changed his view of brands on Facebook. Brands were no longer the soul-sucking necessary evil Facebook endured so they could afford to run their business. Brands had a place on Facebook because people WANTED to connect with them in a social sense. More than anything else, this is a profound argument for the importance of social media as a communications channel.

On the world's largest social network, where people are connecting with long lost friends and loved ones separated by oceans can share their lives, brands no longer need to be online equivalent of the intrusive telemarketing call at dinner that everyone hates to get. They have a seat at the table, and if they behave themselves, they can even share the meal.

Finally there is a place where brands could be welcomed into an authentic conversation with their customers.  Whether you are Mark Zuckerberg or not, it's hard to imagine anything more surprising than that.

How a Drum Shop Uses Social Media To Sell Cymbals

I remember a time when I used to spend hours listening to the sounds that different cymbals made when hit in different locations. If you aren’t a drummer, chances are this moment will be a tougher one to relate to – but trust me when I tell you that the decision to buy a cymbal is a very personal one. You need to find one that has just the right sound to compliment the rest of your drum kit. It’s not uncommon for a drummer to buy a cymbal based ONLY on the sound that it makes when struck in one particular location.

For this audience, you might imagine that the only way you could ever sell a product as nuanced as this would be inside a physical store.  After all, what kind of drummer would buy a mail order cymbal without hearing and testing it out for himself?  The Memphis Drum Shop has figured out a smart way around this issue, and as a result has opened itself up to customers from all around the world.  They have a dedicated YouTube channel where they test out the sound of various cymbals on video and post those videos to let drummers hear a “virtual test” of what the cymbal will sound like.  The channel has been up for a little over four years, and has amassed over 20 million views – not bad for a site targeted to the relatively small niche audience of active drummers.

In reviewing their YouTube site, there are a few great choices that they made which can help your small business if you are considering a similar strategy.  Here are just a few:

1. Great and broad URL. Their official site URL is the enviable www.mycymbal.com. It’s easy to remember, descriptive and is included on every one of their videos to help drive traffic back to their site.
2. Tell people how to have the optimal experience. On every video, they also have the directions “headphones recommended.” For most people viewing a video like this, they may not consider putting on a pair of headphones, but instead of relying on the low quality of most computer speakers, requesting the watcher to use a higher quality headphone (which most musicians will likely have) ensures that the experience of listening to the cymbals in the video is as positive as possible.
3. Focus on the exclusivity and reason to buy. One place where many small businesses fall short is that they do all the work to demonstrate their expertise, but once a consumer is already convinced to buy the product you must also answer the all important question of why they should buy from you.  The Memphis Drum Shop makes it a point in every video to say that the cymbals being played in the video are exclusively available from them – making it far more likely that drummers will follow through and purchase.
4. Demonstrate and live up to your tagline (we are the experts). Often when choosing a tagline for your small business, you’ll pick something that is relatively generic and hopefully descriptive. In the case of Memphis Drum Shop, they picked “we are the experts.” That tagline alone could be claimed by many music shops, however the way that they have built an entire video channel on YouTube to bring this claim to life and demonstrate how true it is helps them to stand out. They really are the experts and have hundreds of videos to prove it.
5. Dedication to adding new content consistently. The last element that makes this strategy work so well is that Memphis Drum Shop is clearly committed to adding videos to their channel consistently.  This isn’t a one time deal or something that one sales associate does whenever he finds time. This is something that the entire store is devoted to doing and maintaining, and therefore potential consumers are much more likely to return consistently and recommend the site and store to fellow drummers as well.

This post is republished from the original article I wrote for the American Express Open Forum website. It is part of "Small Business Friday" on this blog (though sometimes I'm a day late!) - a featured series on ideas and marketing techniques for small businesses.

To read more articles like this, visit the "Small Business Friday" category on this blog.

How "Case Study Blindness" Can Kill Innovation

Last month while working on a strategy for a large client, we had a brilliant idea. This was not the kind of idea that agencies come up with all the time while sitting in a room by themselves drawing pictures on a whiteboard. No, this was the kind of game changing idea that could solve a client challenge and completely engage their audience in a way that no one in their industry had before. Our day to day main client loved it, and the budget was no problem, but before sharing it with the CMO they had a simple but toxic request that I had heard dozens of times before. "We need a similar case study to prove why this will work," they asked. And of course, the idea was so new that there was no comparable case study to be found. And as quickly as it came, the idea died before we could even present it to the CMO who probably would have loved it. Sadly, this is not an uncommon situation. Every day in business, great ideas are killed because of a simple lack of skill and education on how to properly use a case study.

In the business world today, there are few sources of information as revered as the case study. Harvard, like many other business schools, write their own and to be positively featured in one of them is considered to be a badge of honor. MBA candidates learn from case studies, and business professionals in every industry are forced to write and share them with one another in an attempt to transfer earned knowlege from person to person or from division to division within large organizations. The intention is noble: to learn from other's successes and failures as you build your own business or marketing program or operations.

Yet for all of our fascination and idolation of case studies, there is disturbingly little education in the business world about how to properly read and use them. As a result, usually intelligent people voluntarily put on blinders when trying to learn and apply lessons from case studies that they ordinarily would not. This "case study blindness" refers to the situation where businesspeople desperately seek a case study to use internally as permission for starting a new initiative, and are unable to build consensus or support to innovate without it.

It is not that I don't believe in the value of real life examples, or feel they have something important to teach. In every talk I have ever given at hundreds of conferences around the world, I always use real examples and share lessons from them. There is no better way to learn than looking at real experiences. The problem comes in treating a case study as a roadmap - which will only work if you are starting at the same place, with the same product, and the same end goal, at the same time with the same audience. Want to guess how often this is the case? Never.

Instead, what if we used case studies and real life examples as they are best intended ... to spark a new idea. They would no longer be used for justification of good ideas, but as inspiration for for new untried ideas that might work and what we could accomplish with them. Getting over our self inflicted case study blindness may be one of the most important things that any business can do to help create a more innovative business culture.