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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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Your website is the story you want to tell the world.  Do you have a purpose for each page on your site?  Do you know who your intended audience is?  What are you trying to convince them of when they visit your site?  If you can’t answer these questions it becomes blatantly obvious when we view your site.

For the past five years the Paul J. Hill School of Business at the University of Regina has entered the JDC West competition.  JDC West is the largest student run academic case competition in Western Canada which includes prestigious schools such as the University of Alberta, Asper School of Business, and Sauder School of Business.  The complete list can be found here.

The Paul J. Hill School for the past three years have finished in second place.  This is no small feat by any means and it truly shows the quality of students that the school is producing.  For reasons beyond my comprehension you can’t find a link on the School’s website to this competition.  Not just a second place finish, they also raised $21,390.12 for charity and the faculty is more concerned with course offerings?  Something is awry.  If I want to find out about programs offered I’ll search for them, they don’t need to be the first things I read.

For future reference; whatever you’re amazing at, whatever your organization’s claim to fame is, whatever you can do better than everyone else, please tell me on your home page or soon after I enter your site.  I guarantee you’ll impress your audience much more by doing this than putting what YOU think SHOULD be on the site.

Congratulations to the 2010 JDC West team, you truly have achieved something astounding.

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This past week I had the pleasure of working with a friend I met in University.  He has since graduated from the film program at the U of R and now owns his own business called Living Sky Media.  Riley doesn’t charge an hourly rate for filming and editing video.  He can’t.  If he did, his clients would either;

a) Pay an absurd amount of money because he works on a project until it is perfect (or very near perfect) not worrying about time.

or

b) Pay a seemingly miniscule per hour rate to account for the extra time spent making the video great.

When you are passionate about your work time doesn’t matter.  For Riley, he’d rather put in the extra effort to make the video amazing whether he’s getting paid for it or not.

Most financial and business consultants would say this is a terrible business model because it does not amount to being profitable.  If Riley’s main goal was to be profitable he wouldn’t create such amazing video’s.  Now I’m not saying that being profitable is a bad goal to have but putting your passion before profit is something that many people do not do in business.  This isn’t his long term strategy, I bet he’ll do it long enough to show the world how good he is, then by means of demand, he will be forced to raise his price.

What’s your main goal, being profitable or being passionate?

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