White Walls, Lots of Paint

A water bottle has been developed that allows you to take any water from any source (pond, puddle, river, stagnant water) and drink it immediately.  Lifesaver systems, a UK company, claims that their water bottle filters 99.9999% of dangerous bacteria and 99.99% of viruses from all water, no matter the source.

They reference a test conducted by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine as the support for their claims.  The bottle cost $229 US.  Fox News reporter, Allison Barrie, writes, “Just one Boeing C-17 transport plane full of Lifesaver bottles would provide 500,000 people with access to safe drinking water for up to 16 months — saving millions and saving lives.”

Could this bottle really save so many lives in an emergency?  We can all hope.  I would like to see more independent test done by organizations that don’t have a financial interest in the product.  If it is really as good as they claim, hopefully mass production and a kind heart will bring the price down.  But, hey, a life is worth more than $229.  Way to go Lifesaver Systems.

I have created a new restaurant menu site.  A the moment I have about fifteen menus listed and it is growing everyday.  I plan to index New Orleans restaurants first.   The site is menuflavors.com.

View menus from famous restaurants in New Orleans, Emerils, Commander’s Palace, Brennan’s, Bacco, Olive Branch Cafe, and more.

SEE Toys by Zen Design Group are windup toys that never need batteries.  The cool, monetary benefit is, according to the company, you get 15 minutes of use before you have to wind them again.  The wonderful benefit is you never have to worry about your children swallowing batteries.

They have five different toys available: DynaFly, DynaShark, DynaCar, DynaTiger, DynaDophin.  They look cool and I think most kids would like them.  There price from $14.99 to $19.99.  The price seems a little high, but considering you don’t have to buy batteries, the price balances out. 

I would like to see a money back guarantee in case I don’t like it when I get it.  I also don’t get the name, SEE Toys.  What does SEE mean?  Anyway.  I think they would be worth trying out.

As a marketer, getting your ad copy, article, or whatever you are writing read is your number one goal.  Brian Clark, “new media writer/producer, entrepreneur, and recovering attorney”, is the founder of CopyBlogger.com.  His blog is filled with a wealth of information on writing good copy that gets results.  Check him out.  I’m sure you will learn something that will help your sell.

I found this business site with a couple of good marketing podcast, www.churchofthecustomer.com.  The site tagline says, “A business podcast about word of mouth, customer evangelism, and citizen marketing from ‘Creating Customer Evangelists authors Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba.”  I listened to the podcast Are all marketers really liars? A chat with Seth Godin and Measuring word of mouth.  They were short, but informative.

There are also a bunch of links on the podcast pages for different products and sites mentioned in the podcast.  I like this idea.  Many times when I listen to a podcast, I can’t or don’t feel like writing anything down.  ChurchoftheCustomer.com has taken care of the note taking.  I think it would be great if all podcast would do this.  Church of the Customer has found a way to include a free prize within their free podcasts.  Great job.

Long before I read Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin, I believed in the power of attracting interest by giving something away.  In this, and future, blogs, I will write about using Free Prize Marketing to generate buzz.

The first story I would like to tell is a personal one.  In 1995, when I was twenty years old and very new to business, my mother and I opened a consignment shop.  It was the first business I owned.  We were in a poor location, in a little 900 square feet unit of a seven unit mini mall.  There was not enough parking and everyone raced their cars to beat the red light directly in front of the shop.

On Saturday’s we normally made about $200 - $300 dollars.  We often ran sales with no real measurable increase in profits.  Somewhere along the way we started to get customer’s names and  contact information.  We called it a preferred customer’s list. 

One day we decided to send a letter to one hundred people on the list.  In the letter we thanked them for their patronage and invited them to come in on the following Saturday and get a pair of sterling silver hoop earrings for free.  We hand wrote the letters ( I’m not sure I would do that again) and mailed them with a flyer for a 20% off sale on the same Saturday.

The next Saturday we gave away thirty pairs of earrings and made almost $700.  This was almost double our highest collected on any given day.  The key?  We gave something away that was targeted to our group.  The earrings only cost us thirty cents per pair (they were small hoops, but everyone was very pleased with them).  The mailing cost us something like $40.  So, for fifty dollars we were able to more than double what we usually made.

I just finished Seth Godin’s book Free Prize Inside.  As expected, it helped me to take a step back and reanalyze my marketing endeavors.  I have been practicing, although very sparsely, the Free Prize brand of marketing since I opened my first store in 1996.  But Seth’s book as convinced me that Free Prize marketing must be a part of every marketing campaign.  It must be built into the product, the brand. 

The newest and most helpful thing I learned was what Seth calls “Edge Craft”.  Instead of using brainstorming to randomly fire unguided missile, Edge Craft start with where your product is now and then takes you to the extreme edges of marketing that product using Free Prize thinking.  I definitely recommend this book to anyone who is interested in marketing.

You can learn more about Seth Godin, Free Prize Inside, and other books he has written at sethgodin.com

All day long we are bombarded by tv and radio commercials.  As marketers, its time we stop wasting time and money on these unmeasurable, unproductive mediums.

I know that some of you are thinking that so many large and “successful” companies run plenty of television commercials.  And if they are doing it then it must be the right thing to do.  Didn’t your momma tell you don’t do something just because everybody else is doing it.

Most of the big companies don’t get it.  They continue to use traditional marketing instead of adopting new strategies.  For instance, there is a potato chip company running a television commercial right now with a little man visiting a psychologist.  His wife keeps telling him to try the new smaller bags.  He feels she is poking fun at his size.  I have seen that commercial at least nine or ten times and I still cannot remember the brand.  How much more powerful would it be if the next time I went to the store they gave me a free sample of the new bag and a coupon to buy a case or better yet, they delivered them to my work place and gave everyone a free bag and a coupon.  It probable would cost less than the commercial in terms of cost per thousand reached.  But they don’t know that because they can’t measure the true cost per thousand reached with a tv commercial.

Many people are tired of commercials and basically tune them out.  I heard Seth Godin give a statistic that 83% of all Tivo users skip commercials.  That ought to tell you something.

In my opinion, radio commercials are worse than tv commercials.  Almost every time commercials play on the radio, I change the station.  There was an air conditioning commercial on the radio where this guy said “too dirty” in a weird kind of way.  It was really aggrevating.  But they kept playing it over and over and over.  To make matters worses, they made another commercial and the guy said “too dirty” the same way.  The first commercial sounded like he natural said the phrase that way.  You could tell it was forced in the second commercial.  Everytime that commercial comes on there is no doubt I am changing the station.  If I do need an air conditioning company to do some work for me, it won’t be that company.

Spend your marketing dollars creating better products, building relationships with your customers, running promotions that give you more permission, and advertising that doesn’t interrupt, but is statigically placed where the customer is looking for it, like google.com’s adwords program.

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.