Category: Promotion


Play it Safe — and Experiment

Filed Under: Marketing, Pricing, Product, Promotion by apingel — View Comments
August 26, 2010

In Learning From Your Competition, I discussed what things you can learn from your competitors, including what price, which promotions, and which combinations of products are most likely to be effective for your business. But if your business just copies what other businesses do, why should any customer go to you? This is especially true on the internet, where “Just like Facebook, only different” has repeatedly proven a recipe for failure.

What your competition does is safe

Nonetheless, copying the competition is a good place to start your entrepreneurial ventures, because you know there’s a market for what they’re selling. If you offer a product that’s basically the same as your competitors’ most popular product, at a price that’s the average of all their prices, using the same promotional methods as they do, you’re pretty much guaranteed to sell some of it.

It’s a low-risk choice, but it’s also a low-reward choice: since your offering is essentially identical to everyone else’s, you’re relying on the vagaries of fate to randomly steer some of the customers in your direction.

Once you’re safe, then experiment

With your solid base of safe, low-risk products, you have a relatively stable platform from which to explore. Now start experimenting.

Experiment with new products, or product combinations. Would your customers like these new items? Would they like the deluxe edition? Instead of buying products individually, would they like a subscription?

Experiment with prices (the people who select the MSRP are just guessing, too). If you put this on sale for 10%, does it increase the number of sales by more than 10%? If you increase prices on this one by 5%, how many people still buy it? What does it go for on eBay? Does it make sense to have different prices at different times of the day? Different times of the year? In different locations?

Experiment with delivery. Does it make sense to open another location? To offer home delivery? To create e-products that can be sold everywhere? Will customers pay extra for quicker delivery or more efficient locations?

Experiment with promotions. Is advertising the best method? What about networking meetings, or a booth at local events, or seminars at your local library? Are your customers on Facebook? Would they like to receive information via text message or email?

Keep what works, get rid of the rest

Eventually you’ll have a fantastic marketing mix — product, price, distribution, and promotion — that is great for your customers, and gives them a reason to bring their money to you.

Resources for Further Reading
Seth Godin on Competition
Risk Analysis

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Learning From Your Competitors

Filed Under: Marketing, Pricing, Product, Promotion by apingel — View Comments
August 24, 2010

In my last article, I talked about why judging your success by what your competitors have done is stupid. But does that mean that you shouldn’t pay attention to what your competitors are doing?

Not at all — that’s a good way to go out of business. It only means that you shouldn’t decide how well you did based on what your competitors did — your measurements of success should be internal, based on things you care about achieving. Competitor analysis is a terrible way to judge success… but a great way to help you decide what to do.

What you can learn from studying your competition

  • What your customers like
  • What your customers don’t like
  • How much (approximately) your customers are willing to pay
  • New products/services you can offer to your customers
  • What combination of products/services your customers are most likely interested in
  • What promotional methods are most likely to be effective
  • Industry trends
  • Industry standards

Look at what your competitors are doing, so that you can decide what you need to do in response– whether that’s copy it, offer an opposing product, or ignore it — just don’t use them as a standard of success.

Resources for Further Reading
The Problem With Competitive Metrics

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The New Concept of Marketing

Filed Under: Marketing, Product, Promotion by apingel — View Comments
June 7, 2010

Once upon a time, when I was a kid growing up in the 80s, mass production was the rule. The economics looked something like this:

  • My local cobbler can make a pair of shoes that fits me perfectly. It costs $50.

  • My local Payless Shoes can provide me with a pair of shoes that fit OK. They cost $20.

By ignoring their customers’ needs, and focusing on what will turn out the most shoes in the least time, manufacturers were able to drastically reduce the cost of shoes. In turn, we all got used to ignoring our own needs, in order to get lower prices.

The 4 Ps of marketing, then looked like this:

Price (as low as possible) ->
Product (whatever we can make cheaply) ->
Promotion (make people think they want our product) ->
Place (wherever we tell them to go)

In other words, you made what you wanted to make, and then spent money to convince people to buy it.

The new rules

I admit that shoes are still pretty much produced the same way. But your local shoe store has many more options, and there are thousands more online. Whatever your requirements, you can find a shoe that meets them.

There are several driving forces for this, but the long and the short of it is that power has shifted. We no longer have to settle for a product that’s good enough. We can almost certainly find a product that’s ideal.

Many, many companies have yet to realize this. But the intelligent ones have shifted their focus from internal to external. A 5th P has been added, to look like this:

Participation (Talk to people, find out what they like and what they want) ->
Product (Whatever the market wants) ->
Price (as low as the market will bear) ->
Promotion/Participation (let people know that you have what they want) ->
Place (wherever is convenient for your customers)

That is, you make what people want to buy, and then let them know it’s available.

What it means to you

The good news: you no longer have to be a conniving, deceptive weasel to be successful in business. Marketing is no longer about manipulating people into buying stuff they don’t want or need.

The bad news: you can no longer make what you want and manipulate people into buying it. You have to make what other people want.

This brings us back to the venn diagram of happiness in business:

You have to find something that overlaps between what you want to make and what people want to buy.

But at least you don’t have to be a lying scumbag.

Resources for Further Reading
Happiness In Business Diagram
Product Is the New Marketing
The Price Is Right

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The Hardest Thing You’ll Do

Filed Under: Marketing, Personal Development, Promotion by apingel — View Comments
May 31, 2010

Robert Kiyosaki, in Rich Dad, Poor Dad tells a story of a reporter and author who confessed how much she hoped to be a best-selling author like he is.

Kiyosaki looked at some of her writing and proclaimed it much better than his (which I’m sure is true), and suggested that she take a few courses in sales techniques. Offended, the reporter proclaimed herself a “professional” who had obtained her masters so she wouldn’t have to be a dirty, pushy, sleazy salesperson.

Kiyosaki pointed to her notepade where she had written, “Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author.” Not, he pointed out, best ‘writing’ author. She stormed out in a huff.

You’ll Face This Too

This is the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do in your transition from relying on others for money to monetizing yourself. As long as you’re working for a company, you can rely on them to do all the nasty, ugly hard work, like accounting and sales.

Accounting you can pick up. It’s boring, but it’s not difficult. And you don’t have to be very successful before you have enough to outsource it.

Sales, ultimately, you cannot outsource; even if you get others to sell your product for you, you have to convince them that your product is worth selling… you have to sell it to your salespeople.

One way or another, you are going to have to stand in front of people and say to them,
“What I have here is a great product, and you will be worse off if you don’t buy it.”
That’s hard under the best of circumstances. And it’s really hard when the product you’re selling is yourself.

I don’t have an easy answer for you. But know that you’re not alone.

Resources for Further Reading
Sales Dogs
The Sales Bible
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How to Use the Long Tail

Filed Under: Marketing, Product, Promotion by apingel — View Comments
May 26, 2010

In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson discusses the three criteria for a long-tail economy to exist (as it does today in online videos, books, and music):

    1) There must be a large quantity of unique, niche material available (homemade videos, self-published books, indie/garage bands, etc).
    2) There must be an aggregator to bring all of that material together (YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, etc).
    3) There must be a way for people to make the transition from the big hits down into the long tail (Related Videos, People who bought this also liked, Pandora, share this on Facebook, etc).

In You Don’t Have To Be A Rock Star I discussed the implications of the long tail for your product, namely that there is almost certainly a market for it. But what do the other two requirements mean for you?

Lessons for a Long-Tail Artist

Lesson 2: Your stuff has to be in the aggregator.
People aren’t finding awesome home videos by randomly surfing the web; they’re finding new videos on YouTube. Bands need to make sure their MP3s are in iTunes & Pandora; novelists need to make sure their books are sold at Amazon.com.

Not sure which aggregator to use? Get your stuff in all of them — it’s probably free.

Lesson 3: Your stuff has to be linked to related stuff
Most long-tail pushing is done algorithmically — there’s not a person saying, “Wow, this stuff is a lot like David Wilcox! I bet his fans would like this album, too.” Amazon is simply noting that people who buy David Wilcox CDs also buy John Gorka CDs. All the same, there are things you can do to “seed” the likelihood of coming up in a search.

  1. Tag your work accurately — If your photos are of small towns in Colorado, you want it to be found by people looking for Colorado small towns. If your lead vocal is a baritone, don’t claim to be a tenor — you’ll displease the people looking for tenors, and the people looking for baritones won’t ever find you.

  2. Ask a friend or one of your fans to write a review comparing you to someone else.
  3. Instead of giving away copies of your book, give people a 100% coupon if they’ll buy something else at Amazon at the same time.

There are lots of other ideas (those are just the ones that came to me in the last 2.6 minutes), but you get the idea: tell your aggregator who might like you.

Resources For Further Reading
The Long Tail

The above product links are affiliate links. If you enjoyed and appreciated this information, you can give me monetary reward by buying products through those links. Learn More.

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