JephMaystruck.com

I love sushi.  My favorite place is Wasabi at the Normanview crossing.  The other day I wasn’t sure what time they closed so I decided to Google them.  I couldn’t find anything, not a phone number, address, nothing.  Now all I want is the basics; hours open, location, menu (with prices), God forbid a testimonial or two!  Go ahead, try find them on the internet.

I know they can get all this done with minimal to no work at all on their behalf for $1,000-$1,500.  So what’s stopping them? Probably the cost.  But if the average person spends a minimum $10 it would take 100 people who found their site online and convinced them to come thru the door to achieve the site’s break even point. What would you do?

They could take it one step further and have pictures of everything on the menu (their menu is HUGE) or have a Sushi tutorial, teach me about it, give me something more than I’d expect to find on their site. But first things first get a site.

The amazing thing about this Wasabi is that it has a beautiful interior and is the most inexpensive in town (unverified) but a bento box here is $9.99 and it’s delicious!  You can’t tell me more people wouldn’t go there knowing this and why not spread the word?  Start a Facebook group when you join you get 50% off your next visit, then at random once every month that same offer is sent out to all the group members. It might just work, but first they need a site.

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Martin Lindstrom is a fascinating individual, he did a seven million dollar marketing study on the brain and wrote a book about it; Buy-ology: The Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. I encourage you to read it but what got me thinking was a recent podcast put on by Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch.  Talking with Mr. Lindstrom, they simplified it down to semantic markers.  Lindstrom says, “Semantic markers are like a slap on the chin” in a negative or positive way.  Our subconscious makes most of the decisions for us so brands should be trying to create these subtle markers in our minds. Lindstrom goes on to say that small companies should be taking advantage of semantic markers to get a lot of value out of the marketing effort with very little effort.

So how do you create a semantic marker in someone’s mind?  By going to extreme’s and doing something completely unexpected but so memorable it is embedded in our minds.  Remember how good Burger Baron’s billboards were?  They were different and were actually funny that they stuck out in our minds, you’d chuckle to yourself when you thought of Burger Baron.

How about the Roughrider’s Watermelon heads?  Difficult not to talk about those.  It allowed Roughriders fans to show the league how dedicated they really were.  It was different and definitely not for everyone.

Just recently the apparel company 22 Fresh came out with a new outlet store on Facebook.

The only way you can buy anything in the store is if you have “Scrilla”, and you can buy Scrilla or earn it.

This store isn’t for the average person, then again, regular people don’t wear 22 Fresh, it’s cool, it’s new, and you have to have the Scrilla to afford it.

What’s different is memorable.

Lindstrom also discusses why we don’t see more of this ingenious advertising regularly and he attributes it to organizations being too conservative and trying to please the masses.  When you set out to tell everyone a message, no one hears.  Most of the advertising messages we see are targeted at a large number of people and the result isn’t surprising.  The more conservative, politically correct, respectful, polite the message is, the easier it is for us to ignore it.

So the next time you want to tell everyone about your product don’t, come up with a different message, a different medium, cross the line, offend someone, do something that has never been done in your industry, evoke emotion. Otherwise you are just making noise.

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Over deliver.

Seth Godin recently came out with a book titled Linchpin.  If you don’t know the story of how Seth came out with the book it’s worth a read.  To make a long blog short, he offered a free copy of his book in exchange for a minimum donation of $30 towards the Acumen Fund.  Within 48 hours this offer raised $108,000.

There was one slip up, for the people who took advantage of this offer living in Canada, the book wasn’t delivered on time.  Roughly two weeks late, my copy arrived.  I’m sure some people weren’t happy about the late delivery but it was the next event that really took me by surprise and made up for the late delivery. Just last week I receive a similar package in the mail, it’s another copy of the book.  Inside the front cover lies a note from Mr. Godin that offers this second book as a reward for my generosity and that I must now give it away as a present.

I was smiling from ear to ear for the remainder of the day.  Sure it must have cost Seth double the money to send two books, but I think to him having me tell this story is worth it.

If you want guaranteed results from your next marketing strategy, determine what your customer’s expectations of your product or service are, then surpass them.  The proof will be in the story they tell.

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The Flynn effect states that since the 20th century, IQ test scores on average increase by 3 points every decade.  A person taking an IQ test in 1930, scoring in the average, would be considered mentally handicap compared to today’s IQ standards.  As civilization progresses, so does our average intelligence level.  When the knowledge base increases across the board, strange things begin happening. We get smarter.

Something I’ve noticed as of late is that pyramid schemes as business models are still around.  In the past month, two friends have been invited to “recruitment” seminars, which I am proud to say they both, within minutes discovered the pyramid business model and left in disgust.

Now the proper term is “multi-level marketing” (MLM) but it’s the same theme, you make commissions on your sales and on the sales of the people you’ve recruited as sales people.  You can already begin to see the problem.  If I’m selling, then I get you to sell, we are now competing for future sales.  Doesn’t make sense does it.  Not anymore, but it did for a very long time.  What surprises me more is that their is actually a list of companies still around using this as a business model.

As communication worldwide increases over the internet, so do conversations.  Within three minutes of researching MLM I came across a startling figure that 99.9% of all participants end up losing money by joining the organization.  When in history have we been able to verify a businesses legitimacy within five minutes?

Maybe we’re smarter (our IQ’s would say so), maybe we’re just better at finding information which make us seem smarter.  Either way this new generation isn’t dumb, business models such as these are now a joke around the water cooler.  There will always be people who join for unknown reasons, I just hope that if you are ever proposed on a seemingly to good to be true scheme you’ll Google first before signing up.

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