“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.” - Ted Turner

Another Ted Turner quote:
“If I had any humility I would be perfect.”

Aussie diver, Matthew Mitcham, lived out every diver’s dream at the Beijing Games when he scored perfect 10’s on his final dive to leap frog into the gold medal position. You could have easily believed the script was written for a Hollywood movie as Mitcham stopped the Chinese divers from claiming a clean sweep of diving gold medals (except the Hollywood writer probably would have had an American diver winning).

Sensational finishes like this happen, but the majority of Olympic events weren’t so dramatic.

Many business owners are hoping to achieve the “Hollywood” style results with their marketing campaigns. Stuff dreams are made of. A low cost campaign that burst the doors down with new customers. Does it happen? Sometimes but the majority of successful marketing isn’t so dramatic.

Successful athletes train extremely hard to try and achieve their goals without needing the miraculous to happen. Any miracles are then a welcome bonus. Smart business owners build their marketing with the same mindset.

The United States are coming second to China in the Olympics medal tally. That’s a huge failure in their eyes. Australia is only coming 5th, but that’s a huge success.

Sally McLellan comes second in the hurdles and it’s seen as an amazing achievement. Grant Hackett and Eamon Sullivan win silver and we’re disappointed.

Australia’s cyclists, hockey teams and rowers have all finished in the top few in the world but they didn’t win gold (or any medal in some cases) and so they aren’t seen as successful.

Our perception of success is relative to our expectations.

It’s no different in business. Forget comparing yourself to your competition and defining your success based on whether you do things better than them. The true assessment is against your clients’ expectations. Live up to and exceed their expectations - that’s how to determine success.

Today’s medal tally still has little Australia in 5th place, but at the top it is clear that host nation China is thrashing the USA, the traditional powerhouse. Or are they?

Yahoo.com show the medal tally based on total medals rather than a priority on Gold medals. Is anyone fooled by this? Why do they bother?

Is that marketing or misrepresentation? Your marketing message must be believable or it’s a waste of time. Forget the spin. Do you really believe the banks are doing everything they can to make your experience better??

At Netscape, the competition with Microsoft was so severe, we’d wake up in the morning thinking about how we were going to deal with them instead of how we would build something great for our customers…

What I realize now is that you can never, ever take your eye off the customer…

Even in the face of massive competition, don’t think about the competition. Literally don’t think about them.

Mike McCue (Former VP of Technology at Netscape)

Small Business Marketing Lessons By Harvey Cramb (Aged 3 ½)

Olympic Hockey Goalkeeper  (Click image to enlarge)

The Scene: Harvey has totally been addicted to the Olympics since they started, so it was no real surprise to come home one afternoon to the glorious sight shown in the picture above. He was very proud of his hockey goalkeeper outfit complete with mask and shin pads.
Harvey: Dad, I’ve been playing Olympics.
Me: What sport have you been playing?
Harvey: It’s a secret. Try and guess.
Me: Basketball?
Harvey: No.
Me: Swimming? (No) Athletics? (No) Water Polo? (No) Cycling? (No)
Harvey: Dad, I’ll give you a clue. [Whispering] It starts with “hock”.
Marketing Lesson: Don’t play games when trying to communicate your marketing message. Make it easy for your target audience to get the message.

Why should potential clients use you? It’s a secret. Try and guess.
It might sound a bit ridiculous but many small businesses are playing the same guessing game as Harvey and I were. Do you ever find yourself getting frustrated because potential customers have read your brochure or looked at your website but still don’t seem to understand why they should use your products or services?

If your marketing materials talk all about the features rather than the benefits of your products or services then you’re hoping that the potential client will correctly guess the benefits. If you’re talking all about yourself, your history, your location and equipment, then you’re hoping the reader will guess why those things are beneficial to them.

If there are 6 reasons why someone should use you, don’t make them try and extrapolate them from all the copy on a 3 fold brochure - give them a list specifically stating the 6 reasons.

Make it easy and obvious. Forget guessing games.

Something!

Good marketing is never achieved through only one or two marketing activities. It needs a multi-pronged attack. So get busy.

If you’re not sure what you should be doing to market your business, start by doing something. Don’t wait until you have the perfect mix of marketing activities planned before you start anything.

It is still important to take the time to develop the right strategy and plan but some activity is better than nothing.

I’d rather see you giving things a try, not sitting on the sidelines convincing yourself that something wouldn’t work.

Which one is better marketing - a dollar spent on the customer’s experience or a dollar spent on advertising?

Spending money on creating a great customer experience can appear to eat into your margin, but not if you view that expenditure as part of your marketing budget.

Starbucks have learnt the hard way (actually they don’t seem to have learnt). Starbucks built their place in the market through superior customer experience and didn’t spend one cent on mass media advertising. Then came a change in leadership and a change in direction.

Bean-counters (excuse the pun) saw the savings that could be made on the sale of each cup of coffee by eliminating some of the nice touches that created such a great customer experience. But what looked liked a saving wasn’t really a saving. By removing the things that made them remarkable, they had to try and make up that lost ground by advertising which has in fact gobbled up more of their money than they saved.

Advertising works, don’t get me wrong, but you cannot simply remove customer experience costs and get the same results with your advertising dollar.

There’s no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting. (David Letterman)

Small Business Marketing Lessons By Harvey Cramb (Aged 3 ½)

The Scene: Harvey was playing with some of his toys when Olive (12 months) crawled over to where he was and starting playing with the same toys.
Harvey: Olive, you need to share. Give those toys back or you will have to go to the mat.
Marketing Lesson: People’s choices are driven by two desires: to avoid pain or to gain pleasure.

As you can tell from Harvey’s attempt at behaviour management, we use a mat in our house for timeout as a consequence for bad behaviour or not following instructions. We also use rewards and encouragement for good behaviour. Nothing blow away there. Parents and teachers have been using rewards and consequences as the basis of behaviour management for years (probably forever).

The reason that these techniques work is the fact that kids are all driven to avoid pain or to gain pleasure. But these two basic factors also drive every decision adults make.

If you boil down all the reasons that people buy from you, you will find they are all trying to avoid pain or gain pleasure in some form. Your marketing job is to communicate how stark the difference is between the levels of pain/pleasure in using your products or services versus not using you. If that difference is great enough then you will have a sale every time.