White Walls, Lots of Paint

We all love to receive gifts.  It makes us feel good.  Knowing that people love to receive gifts, why don’t we, as business owners and managers, give away more things to our customers?  The first response I usually get to that suggestion is, “I am not in business to give things away.”  Most people respond this way because that don’t understand how valuable giving something away can be. 

Marketers spend billions of dollars trying to get people’s attention.   We are bombarded with so many messages that we generally block them out.  As an experiment, try counting the billboards to and from the mall or work.  Do we really pay attention to all this noise?

When someone says I am going to receive something for free,  I am all ears.  Of course that comes with a caveat.  If it is a telemarketer, or any other form of impersonal, “who are you trying to swindle”, offer, I am the first to hangup the phone or head in the other direction.  So, how do you give something away, not scare the prospect off, and win a greater relationship with them?

All different types of business interact differently with their customers.  There are many scenarios.  But there are a few general rules to follow.  First, don’t lead with the gift or at least follow very close behind with more information about your business.  If the only thing the customer knows is that you want to give something away without first revealing who you are and what your motives, are; they will not want anything to do with you or your gift.  Second, the gift has to be valued by the recipient.  If you tell customers to return to your store on Friday to receive a free gum drop, most will look at you like you’re crazy.  But if you tell woman they will get free makeup, many will come running.  Finally, the offer should gain you more permission to do business with the customer.  Require them to give you something in return for the gift, like their email address with permission to send new item updates.  This is where you real start to realize how valueable giving something away can be for both you and your customers.

In creating this blog, I was asked to make a tagline that described it.  I know that writing to a particular audience is good.  I usually can ramble on about most subject.  In this blog I am going to mostly talk about marketing and business.

As a start I would like to tell you about one of my earliest business ventures.  I and my brother were around eleven years old.  We, like most kids in the neighborhood, loved to ride bicycles.  We also had learned by then that making money was something we wanted to do.  So, we decided to open a bicycle repair shop.  The shop consisted of a bicycle pump, a couple of screw drivers, two wrenches, some lighter fluid, and matches.  Our first customer was Allen.  We knew Allen from around the neighborhood, but he was not a close friend.  It was a good thing he wasn’t.  If he had been, he wouldn’t have been after the day we worked on his bike.

He had gotten a new set of pedals and wanted us to change them for him.  Simple enough.  We had changed bicycle pedals before so we knew it would be easy.  We tried for thirty minutes to get those pedals off with no progress.  They just wouldn’t come off.  That’s when one of us, I ‘m not sure which one, came up with the bright idea to burn them off.  That’s right, we doused the pedals with lighter fluid and set them on fire.  It seemed logical.  The pedals were, after all, plastic.

Well, it didn’t work.  And to make matters worse, Allen showed up while his bike was engulfed in flames.  Now to our defense, it looked much much worse than it really was, but all he saw was his bike melting in an incinerator of flames.  When the fire finally went out the bike could still be ridden, but the pedals were a chard mass that not even the smallest of feet could balance on.

That day we start and ended our bike business.  We learned a very valuable thing, don’t burn your customers.  You might not be able to fix it later.