For anyone looking for a new job (pay attention college grads) or trying to get that next big sale and running into a roadblock because you can’t get the attention of a key decision maker, check out this brilliant job search strategy by copywriter Alec Brownstein.
- Brownstein used Google AdWords to target Ad Agency Creative Directors on Madison Avenue in New York
- He bet 15 cents per click that these Creatives were no different than the rest of us self absorbed people who Google ourselves
- What the CD’s saw when they Googled themselves was a personal ad from Brownstein – BRILLIANT!
- Young & Rubicam offered him a job!
Note: Brownstein’s Google Job Experiment YouTube video has been viewed over 500,000 times! Rock on Alec!
I suppose with all the beautiful newness and growth that Spring brings, I find myself more inspired and looking for ways to help my clients breakthrough with innovative new ways of doing things.
Spring never fails me.
I truly work on being innovative and constantly look for inspiration inside and outside of my industry.
And, it’s always awe inspiring to me to see common things done in an uncommon way.
How about square watermelons?
As you know, a round watermelon can take up a lot of space in your refrigerator and the usually round fruit often sits awkwardly on refrigerator shelves.
Innovative Japanese farmers have forced their watermelons to grow into a square shape.
They do it by inserting the melons into square, tempered glass cases while the fruit is still growing on the vine.
Here’s a picture of the packaging.
And, here’s one way Mr. Clean uses Crosswalk lines for advertising/product placement:
And, here’s another use by a local office supply store:
If you’re inspired to become more innovative – anyone can learn to be more innovative – try using Ideo’s method cards and/or reading: The Ten Faces of Innovation: Ideo’s Strategies for Beating the Devil’s Advocate & Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization. And, read a few of Roger Von Oech’s books too. Roger and I go back a long way – he’s been giving me whacks on the side of my head for many years..
Making common repeatable things easy for people to do is great way to stand out from the crowd and make money too.
Internet search engine fatigue is a biggie for me – and for over 70% of you too – and AllMyFaves has been a godsend to me. It’s a simple virtual and visual directory that includes a list of top and most visited sites in major daily-used subject categories such as Blogs, Entertainment, Games, Kids Shopping, Travel and Weekly Favs, but the Home Page alone is awesome.
AllMyFaves is an interesting customer service model for a self help tool. And, it’s a great model for those of us looking to drive revenue because making things easier for time starved people is a killer strategy and will always be a welcome one.
Are you easy to do business with? Are there ways to improve your processes to improve your “easiness?” Can you improve your messages (e.g., Web site) with more visuals and/ore better design? Is it easy to search your own Web site and find things?
Study AllMyFaves and I’m sure you’ll find a few ideas to apply to your business and improve your quality of internet search life at the very same time.
Check out the AllMyFaves story here.
Over the next two days, we’re participating in two separate presentations to the Pittsburgh American Marketing Association at the Duquesne Club downtown and to students at Chatham University.
My client John Graf – co-owner of the Priory Hospitality Group – and I are co-presenting and will review the success of our Winter White Wedding program which has driven first quarter wedding bookings by 400% and continues to rock – it helped us win the Pittsburgh American Marketing Association’s Grand Marketer of the Year Award!
The Priory’s Winter White Weddings are a true testament to the success of “Blue Ocean Strategies” that profitably transform brands by pursuing low cost brand differentiation that makes your competition irrelevant.
To help you sail in Blue Oceans, click this link to review the Priory’s PowerPoint deck:
AMA Pittsburgh Marketer of the Year Priory Hotel 3.16.10
As a 50 percenter of Irish blood and a serial marketing professional, I thought I’d offer you dear reader, my 15 Marketing Lessons of St. Patrick’s Day to help you find your little pot ‘o gold at the end of a rainbow!
And, I’ll offer them quickly because I shouldn’t even be working today – St. Patrick’s Day is one of my many “high holy days” - and there’s a Guinness pint with my name of it at one of my favorite Pittsburgh Irish pubs (Paddy’s Pour House) and it’s getting warm! So here you go!
1. Green Marketing Lesson One – Making Money. Always keep money (making it or saving it) front and center of any marketing campaign. If you know anything about the Irish (and I do growing up in a large extended family), the majority have experienced challenging economic times and know the value of a dollar. So, incorporating zero based budgeting into your marketing processes will help you become more creative and help you do a lot more for less.
2. Green Marketing Lesson Two – Sustainability. These days when you hear brands talk about sustainability, it’s related to the environment, but the basic pure definition of sustainability is “the capacity to endure.” Using the same color in your marketing communications reinforces your brand, makes your marketing work harder for you and enables your marketing to endure.
3. Green Marketing Lesson Two – Color. Design and color can help you communicate a great deal. Red – hot, stop; Blue – cool. etc., Keep in mind that all colors also come in a great deal of shades so don’t be boring and predictable. Green has about 50 unique shades.
4. Create Multi-Sensory Emotional Appeals (e.g., appeal to people’s five senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell). In a recent post about, “Marketing with Sound,” I discussed the awesome power of sound, but you should also consider all of the ways you can appeal to your customer’s five senses. St. Patrick’s Day appeals them all with color, strong visuals of parades, people having fun; taste of ethnic foods like corned beef and cabbage and drink (pints of Guinness and shots of Jameson) etc.,
5. Appeal to One’s Ethnic Heritage. There’s nothing wrong with appealing to people’s ethnic heritage – net, different strokes for different folks. In fact, it’s a growing and popular strategy due to our mobile society, immigration, single parent households etc.
Some of this strategy’s keys to success include knowing your market well, being aware of unique cultural nuances, being respectful etc. Disney’s Epcot Theme Park’s World Showcase is a great example of ethnic marketing, but Denny’s Restaurants’ recent Pancake promotion is not.
6. Be Inclusive with Your Marketing. As much of an Irish heritage appeal the holiday provides, St. Patrick’s Day is all-inclusive and welcomes everyone to celebrate – everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day!
7. Special Event/Thematic/Celebration/Holiday Marketing. Giving a unique thematic association to your marketing messages makes it easier for your customers to understand you and more immediately recognize you too. Tie-ing in to a major holiday celebration gives your promotion authenticity and a “reason why” you’re holding a sales event.
8. Limited Time Appeal. Having a hard date against a campaign creates urgency, excitement and traffic. Pretty obvious statement, but many marketers leave far too many campaigns without a clear end date and a sense of urgent appeal.
9. Spokesperson/figurehead/celebrity/image appeal. Having a Saint as your celebrity figurehead ain’t too shabby, but it’s the consistency of using the same appealing celebrity with a unique story is what works.
10. Iconic Marketing – Shamrock – brand, sell, profit. Mickey Mouse’s Ears, Ronald McDonald’s big red shoes, McDonald’s Arches and more.
Shamrocks do the same for today’s holiday – it’s the day’s badge of honor and identification. What’s your badge ID?
11. Rule of Threes. Legend has it that St. Patrick used the common Shamrock to teach the Celtic Pagans about the unique Holy Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – 3 in 1 Godhead.
However, the “rule of three” symbolism in the good man’s teaching is relevant today as well because people’s minds are noisy and limited. Using the rule of three enables you to get them to remember you and buy-in a presentation or product mix selection. Small, medium, large; gold, silver, bronze; 3 bears; 3 blind mice; 3 Stooges (see more examples/proof here) – trust me – the rule of three rocks.
12. Be Positive. You won’t find a more positive group of people that the Irish. Despite all of their “Troubles” who else tells you that you can find a pot ‘o gold at the end of a rainbow? At Pittsburgh’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade this past Saturday, people throughout the day referred to the cold constant rain as nothing more, “a little Irish mist!”
13. Be Nice. You’d be hard pressed to find a nicer bunch of people than the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day too.
14. Have fun and don’t take yourself so seriously. In this age of “political correctness” the Irish are for the most part a happy and fun bunch and most Irish demeaning jokes bounce of them like water on a duck.
15. Plan Your Luck by Working Hard. In my opinion, “the luck of the Irish” is based on hard work – simple as that. You’ve probably heard the saying, the harder you work the luckier you get!” Well, its true. The majority of Irish are no strangers to hard work and I believe – all things being equal – people that work harder and smarter than their peers will meet with more profitable success in a shorter period of time.
Got to run, my pint is getting warm.
Slan (Gaelic for “farewell for now”)!
It seems to me that over the past few years, many of us have veered far away from sound thinking. Not just strategic thinking – simple common sense thinking too – and just about all other kinds of thinking in between.
I’ve always been one to strive for better ways to use my noodle and to put it to good use. Certainly, I’ve had my share of blunders, but when I carefully analyze them, I realize that I didn’t take time to think to make a sound decision, gather enough intelligence, come up with enough good ideas etc., and ACT!
I owe a great deal of my street smarts to my brothers and parents – especially my father. And, I owe a lot of my business savvy to several generous mentors over the years. Plus, I’ve gained a great deal of inspiration and insight into better thinking by reading a mini library of books.
I’ve spent my entire professional life in Marketing, and a few authors and books that have helped me in the marketing thinking field include David Ogilvy’s, Confessions of an Advertising Man; and, A Whack on the Side of the Head, by Roger Von Oech.
However, these books don’t even come close to scratching the surface for me. I read a new marketing related book just about every two weeks and several magazines, e-zines etc., Plus, I continuously drink the cool-aid and read and re-read the works of great thinkers like Edison, Godin, Jobs, Kawasaki, Peters, Reis and Trout and more.
A great tool I use is a gift (I paid for the tool, but it’s so valuable to me that I consider it a gift) I received from the innovation masters at IDEO (absolutely love these people). IDEO’s Method Cards have helped me to discover better design ideas.
Today, with so much information at your fingertips and the pace of new information coming at you fast and furious from so many sources, it is increasingly difficult to process it all and make sound decisions and act upon them.
So what can you do?
For me, I’ve found that John Maxwell’s book, Thinking For A Change: 11 Ways Highly Successful People Approach Life and Work to be very beneficial.
I enjoyed and got some use out of Malcolm Gladwell’s, Blink, whose POV is based more on the merits of intuitive, quick thinking rather than Maxwell’s critical thinking hypothesis – which I prefer – and when I take time to do it magical things happen.
Thinking For A Change’s case is based upon the hypothesis that successful people think differently than unsuccessful people and says that if you change your thinking, you will change your life. Yeah, I’d bet on that.
Here are the 11 thinking skills the book teaches:
1. Big-picture thinking – does your thinking extend beyond you and your world
2. Focused thinking - concentrate to find clarity on your actual problems
3. Creative thinking – think outside the box and find break through thinking
4. Realistic thinking – does your thinking have a solid foundation based in reality
5. Strategic thinking – is your thinking leading to ways for you to reach your potential
6. Possibility thinking – helps you find solutions to difficult problems
7. Reflective thinking – revisit history to gain understanding and learn from it
8. Popular thinking – question popular thinking and see if you’re simply rejecting the limitations of common thinking
9. Shared thinking – connect with others to expand and sharpen your thinking
10. Unselfish thinking – consider others and their needs
11. Bottom-line thinking – be focused on results
Maxwell also provides a lot of good examples of these thinking styles at work and I’m sure the book will help you become a better thinker. This is a great book for breaking down the critical thinking process and encouraging people to start thinking again. Especially during these fast times we live in where we all get a ton of new messages every day and information overload is overwhelming.
Maxwell’s book about critical thinking, whereas Gladwell’s Blink is a book about intuitive thinking. To think better you need to practice both methods.
P.S.: Check out some of Thomas Edison’s thoughts on creativity and hard work too. Lots of good books on old Tom. I loved At Work with Thomas Edison, by Blaine McCormick. Also, consider adding Edison’s Idea Quota into your daily routine!
Twenty years or so ago, I had several conversations with marketing colleagues about how supermarket chains lacked creativity. The general experience was underwhelming and one that most people dreaded.
During those years, I would take Cadillac, Oldsmobile and McDonald’s clients into Wegman’s supermarkets throughout western, New York to show them how great they were and to learn merchandising, customer service and overall retailing lessons they could take back to their car dealerships and restaurants.
They were amazed that you entered the store through the produce department instead of the typical trip past the cash registers as was the general industry practice way back then. Their merchandising strategies had no peer.
Wegman’s then and now, is one of the most innovative and well-run supermarket chains in America. It’s no surprise to me that they’re ranked #3 on FORTUNE “100 Best Companies to Work For.” They are consistently ranked as one of the top supermarket chains in the country and have received a ton of well deserved awards.
Stew Leonard’s – the world’s largest dairy store – was a hot case study of discussion too.
And way back then, I could not understand why the innovation I saw across the country was not occurring in my own backyard.
About 10 years ago, I got some some luncheon meat from the deli at my hometown Giant Eagle supermarket and was ecstatic to receive it in a plastic bag instead of paper! I mentioned my discovery to a colleague of mine whose spouse worked for the company and told me that the store received the bags as part of some deal and they were simply testing to get some use out of them. Amazing – it was a huge boost to my satisfaction. This little simple new touch was so well received that it quickly spread throughout their stores and became a permanent part of their system.
Well, something must be a bit different in the water these days in Pittsburgh’s three rivers (especially the Allegheny River) because Giant Eagle has been on a tear of remarkably innovative new product launches such as its:
- GetGo Convenience Stores
- FuelPerks and FoodPerks – a billion dollar business conceived by CEO David Shapira – a great businessman and humanitarian
- Giant Eagle Market District
And now, Giant Eagle is testing in four concept stores it’s latest innovation for HBW (health/beauty/wellness) which could become a huge profit center by linking its supermarket pharmacies with its HBW departments. What a stroke of innovative genius.
I’m happy the new Giant Eagle has finally landed in “innovation land.” Their story should demonstrate to older established brands that it’s never too late to innovate.
To profitably increase your market share you need to establish an innovation plan and follow it. Don’t wait for competitors to come into your neighborhood to force you to do it. Self inflicted innovation is the preferred route to take.
P.S.: Not all innovations have to be big and expensive – think deli meat plastic bags.
Pancakes in a can? I’m all in!
What a simple brand promise – so easy and clear to understand.
Think Reddi-Whip aerosol can, but think Pancakes – maybe think both at the same time (hint – writing this during dinnertime – and, I’m a little hungry)!
Anyway, I plan to try NEW Batter Blaster this weekend, after eating up it’s marvelous marketing and unique story for some time now. You can learn a ton about how to effectively create and launch a new product by studying the good folks at Batter Blaster. For example, here are just a few reasons why they’re achieving amazing success:
- They created a truly new product that solves a need. Make pancakes easy and quick to make with little waste and mess. Everyone knows that it’s a pain to make pancakes for one or two people – especially in the morning if you work. Most people blow off breakfast – the most important meal of the day – because of a lack of time – so, Batter Blaster to the rescue! Plus, BB cakes must taste pretty good to be able to quickly earn nearly $20 million in 2009 sales when it just got up and running in 2005. Certainly it might not be the best tasting pancake you ever had – taste is a subjective attribute – but balanced on the whole against speed and convenience, it must taste OK and certainly worth a try.
- Clear Positioning – Easy, Quick, Better…Fun. Shake, point and shoot! It’s so easy to talk about it – so easy to explain. People get the core value proposition spot on and it’s easy to spread the buzz. Everything about Batter Blaster is easy – their web site, lists recipes, places to find product, product information and it’s a cinch to find contact information too. And, it’s fun – love the 50′s-style jingle when you hit the home page – “Make a better breakfast faster, Batter Blaster! It’s a spot on benefit rich positioning statement that’s easy to remember.
- Show and Tell and Proof of Performance. Great use of demos, testimonials too – love the Guinness Record Book move – brilliant!
- Great use of Public Relations and Social Media – How about 9,000 Facebook fans of Pancakes-in-a-Can! Let’s face it though – it’s a much easier to get coverage and viral buzz when you deliver on your promise!
In this age of iPod, iPhone and now iPad…iWant, INeed, iGotta have me some iPancakes from Batter Blaster because I’m thinking I’m going to love them! At least one time!
I just love this lawsuit kicked off by The North Face – an premium preppy outdoor apparel and gear company – vs. The South Butt – a skunk works operation run by a college kid.
The North Face giant is suing the kid – Jimmy Winkelmann, a University of Missouri college student for trademark infringement, dilution and unfair competition.
The logos and clothing are a bit similar. And, The North Face’s lofty slogan, “Never Stop Exploring” is positioned against the far less lofty and comfortable mission of The South Butt’s which is, “Never Stop Relaxing.”
For The North Face to win, they have to prove that the two brands are confusingly similar. They’ll lose…I’d bet on it. There’s no doubt that the two companies are different. I think the average person knows the difference between a face and a butt. Don’t you?
In the meantime, The South Butt is smoking hot and taking advantage of being bullied – their Web site has earned nearly 20 million Google hits. The South Butt smartly recognized that everyone loves the underdog so they’re making the case well known. And they’ve launched a cool The South Butt Challenge Facebook App to boot!
Jimmy’s going to ride this all the way to the bank and I’ll also bet that he graduates from Mizzou with no school loans!
What’s the marketing lesson? Well, it’s an old and simple one.
The North Face should have left sleeping dogs lie and left Jimmy alone. They’re flaming his fire and contributing to his success by airing their grievance.
This is a classic case of market share leaders making the stupid mistake of identifying and attacking competitors no matter how big or small. They have nothing to gain and more to lose.
Class dismissed.
Throughout the year, I’ve been using WordPress more and more to build a variety of Web sites and have been super impressed with it.
Not only is WordPress easy to use for non-programmers, but it is so search engine friendly that my clients have easily realized double and triple digit increases in Web traffic.
I’m always on the lookout for new Web technologies and in the world of Content Management Systems, I just researched WordPress a bit more to see if it was too good to be true because there are so many out there (see list here).
My concerns were put to rest after I caught this video of Matt Cutts who works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues.
“Straight From Google: What You Need To Know”
WordCamp San Francisco – May 30, 2009, by Matt Cutts
In this video (see about 3:10 minutes in), Matt states that if you want to do better in Google, “WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues.” and that it is such a fantastic piece of software that, “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of your Search Engine Optimization mechanics.”
Matt’s word is good enough for me and I encourage you to watch this video for additional SEO tips. I’ve been a big Google fan since its birth and it’s quality people like Matt Cutts that keep me loyal.
Check out Matt Cutts’ Gadgets, Google, and SEO Blog too – good stuff.
