Category Archives: Marketing

Gibberish

In the midst of your product, service, or brand transaction careful with your choice of words. Even though, you know the lingo and how it works – the customer may not.

For instance…

Today, the Realtor should have only one song streaming in his car while his clients are riding with him…INTEREST RATES WILL NEVER BE THIS LOW AGAIN. He should play that song over and over and over. And he should not just say they are 3.75% fixed over 30 years – that doesn’t mean much to most people. He should paint the picture of what rates were just a few years ago, and show the difference in monthly payments and interest saved. Like the blog at I’m A Happy Buyer.

The financial advisor should probably stay away from his opinion of the “T-Bill” and simply advise us with historical charts of different fund performance, potential dividend performance, and tax benefits when we hand him our dollar. GDP is not on our radar when we’re talking about retirement and college tuition.

The car salesman, for most people, should abandon words like torque, hemi, and maybe even MPG. Just show us what THIS car will cost compared THAT car to fill up once gas hit $5.00 gallon. We’ll make the call from there.

Or what about beer? At the ball park the only word associated with the brew that the consumer is concerned with is cold. This is not the time to discuss born on dates, filtering, and calories. Not the case at an upper end micro-brewery in Boston. The consumer there is very beechwood and hops conscious, so it’s ok to go there with him.

The higher price of poker becomes in the transaction the more basic the vocabulary should be. The fancier your words, the more we feel we’re being sold not served. Simple wins in sales, so be careful with your gibberish.

Put another way – We’re not impressed when you know a lot…we’re impressed when we walk away knowing a lot more than when we came to you.

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Melted Cheese

In the last week I’ve chosen to eat at two restaurants because of their offer of free melted cheese – queso.

They got me.

And so have all these other products, companies, and teams with their own variations of melted cheese.

  • Amazon’s offers queso with Prime (free shipping).
  • Apple’s queso is interface (all products talk the same lingo).
  • The Dallas Maverick’s offer a side of queso with their owner – Mark Cuban.
  • TOMs shoes offers queso in the form of philanthropy.
  • Southwest Airlines queso tastes like affordability and on-time arrival.
  • Zappos changes their queso recipe daily, but I’ve never not come back for more.

 

You won’t believe what the world will do for free queso. So offer it.

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Degree Insert

What if some variation of this was inserted into every tube they put a degree in next month across our nation’s universities?

  • Busy doesn’t mean profitable.
  • The difference in you at 22 and you at 27 will be the books you read and the people you meet. Shake a lot of hands, be nice, and read everything you can get your hands on (the subject doesn’t matter).
  • You get to use your notes in real life – so take good ones and pay attention.
  • You never know the test question in real life – so train, prepare, be sharp, and know your stuff.
  • Find as many mentors as you can possibly gather and spend as much time as you can with them.
  • Take a sabbath and it doesn’t have to be on Sunday.
  • Don’t trade love for money. If there’s no passion in your work, your art will reflect that.
  • Stay close with the friends you’ve made here. They will be on the same battle field you are throughout life.
  • The news media buys your eyes by selling ads. Careful with claiming it as gospel.
  • Just because you can TiVo doesn’t mean your TV consumption should go up.
  • Work hard then work smart. It rarely works in reverse order.
  • Google everything.
  • Find out what it means for you to Let The Music Play.

Looking back over the last 2,500 days, I’ve learned a lot since graduation. Often I’ve wished what I’ve learned would have been taught during my college days.

But I’m not so sure it can be taught. It appears it has to be learned.

PS – I just noticed that learned has the word “earned” in it. Looks like there is supposed to be effort and challenge involved in learning these things.

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How Soon?

How soon will it be until all of this sets in?

  • The world is smaller than ever and shrinking in size daily.
  •  A Human Touch > Digital Footprint
  • Print media Kool-Aid has passed its use by date.
  • Decision and action will change your life.
  • Music gets noticed in a noisy world.
  • Cheese moves.
  • Love wins.

Timing is everything so pray it sets in sooner than later.

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Fewer, Less, Shorter…

The future will belong to:

  • The products with fewer buttons.
  • The websites with the less gap between consumer click and human response.
  • The shorter blogs and shorter books.

Say adios to all your bells and whistles.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophisticationLeonardo da Vinci

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