Monthly Archives: May 2009

Tagline For Physical Therapy Training Program?

Names + Taglines

I need something snappy for a physical therapy training program. They give CEU credits for their seminars. I thought of “train with the best” “the credit you deserve” – so cliche!

They are well known in the industry, respected, have a lot of events around the US, a large DVD/CD product line … they need to be seen as THE #1 source of physical therapy training CEU’s and products.

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Jay’s Answer:

  • We Train You To Help Others
  • Exceed Your Client’s Expectations
  • Holistic Education Improves Your Whole Practice
  • Not Just Education…A New Perspective

Grand Opening Ideas For Small Children’s Shop

Products, Publicity, Starting Out

We have just opened a very small retail shop which carries fine children’s clothing, toys, and other gifts. Our main concern is how to attract new people to this shop, and for our grand opening, especially because we have an extremely small budget. Our main benefit is that we We are a sister company to a large swimming instructional school which is located right next door. We know that our main group of customers will be from the swim school, and we are already completely making use of that customer base. My main concern is getting new people in the door for our grand opening in a couple of weeks. We are going to be flyer-ing cars with a small discount attached and we are doing a pass along email to friends and family. The grand opening is going to be week long, and we are doing daily giveaways and a grand prize. But, we can’t even afford a mailer right now.

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Jay’s Answer: Have you offered a referral bonus to customers that the swim school refers? If there’s a swim team, give the bonus to the team to pay for gas, cover-ups, etc.

Where do the parents go when their kids are taking swim classes? Make it your store by offering free drinks and snacks (comarket with a local snack shop) and a cool place to sit and read.

When kids are waiting for their class to start, or for their parents to pick them up, where do they wait? Can you offer to set up a small game room for them to use?

Also: consider an essay contest (“Why I want to win the prize”) for a shopping spree. Post the entries on a wall, let everyone vote for their favorite (using an email address?). A press release about the contest would be a natural for the local newspapers to pick up on.

What Comes First? Ready..Aim..Fire?

Creative Business Ideas

Ready..Aim..Fire
Photo by Mark Walz

No doubt the phrase “ready..aim..fire” has been drummed into your head as the right way to do things:

  • Ready means prepare for action.
  • Aim means to choose your target.
  • Fire means to spring into action.

If each time you “fire”, it takes a lot of time or money, then investing time/money preparing and aiming makes good sense. For example, if you are thinking of building a custom home (which costs a lot of money and takes a while to construct), you’d be prudent to study what types of homes people are buying, design a home that fits the market you’re going after, and perhaps even test market the design before you even break ground.

But what if you are a one-person business, and you’re thinking of doing a email blast to your mailing list? The cost for an email blast is basically zero, so why spend a lot of time preparing it? This is one of the principles of guerrilla marketing – try something, see the effect, try something else, continue. It keeps you away from analysis paralysis.

In Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game Of Tennis (and other “Inner Game…” books), he found a key way to quickly improve your tennis game is to have someone else tell you what the result of your action was. For example, if you’re practicing serving, hearing “the ball was 2 feet outside the baseline” creates a feedback loop. You hear the result, and your system naturally (and quickly) adjusts to achieve the desired result.

The key point is: After you “fire”, make sure you pay attention to your results. Learn what works better, and continue to hone your actions.

Selling The Invisible

Book Reviews

Buy Selling The InvisibleSelling The Invisible is packed with tips and insights on how to market your business services. Harry Beckwith claims that most marketing advice is based on a product marketing model, most of which doesn’t apply to service businesses.

He makes each point in just a few paragraphs, which makes this book easy to grab when you only have a few minutes for marketing inspiration.

His key points include:

  • Before marketing your service, make it great.
  • Don’t just create what the market needs or wants. Create what it would love.
  • Survey people by phone.
  • Don’t do focus groups.
  • Marketing is not a department. It’s your business.
  • Every act is a marketing act. Make every person a marketing person.
  • If you’re selling a service, you’re selling a relationship.
  • Your real competitor is often your customer (either they do it themself or they don’t believe anyone can do it).
  • Marginal tactics executed passionately almost always will outperform brilliant tactics executed marginally.
  • Think dumb. Smart people are experts at squashing good ideas.
  • Take advantage of the Recency Effect. Follow up brilliantly.
  • Forget looking like the superior choice. Make yourself an excellent choice. Then eliminate anything that might make you a bad choice.
  • To broaden your appeal, narrow your position.
  • Choose a position that will reposition your competitors; then move back toward the middle to cinch the sale.
  • Generic names encourage generic business.
  • Your first competitor is indifference.
  • Saying many things usually communicates nothing.
  • After you say one thing, repeat it again and again.

What Are You Really Buying?

Branding, Creative Business Ideas, Products

The moral is...
Photo by Sherman

I read with great interest the article “Burt’s Bees, Tom’s of Maine, Naked Juice: Your Favorite Brands? Take Another Look — They May Not Be What They Seem“. Andrea Whitfil does a great job unearthing how many natural and organic brands that we perceive as being produced by small companies are in reality now owned by large multinational corporations. And she’s very bothered by the deception.

When you offer a product or service, you’re actually making two separate promises: a primary logical offering and a secondary branding promise. The logical offering addresses the reason someone would choose your offering: price, speed, cost, efficiency, resources, quality of life, etc. These benefits are easily measured: how much faster/cheaper/better/bigger is your business or life.

The branding promise is much more subtle. Purchasing the offering will create a feeling in the buyer. They’ll feel like they’re now part of a specific community. They’ll feel better about them self. It will create an emotional reaction to making the purchase. The emotion may not make logical sense, but the feeling it produces is real enough.

What Andrea is complaining about is that many products have broken the branding promise. Andreas felt that she was supporting small businesses that were working hard to make a difference to the planet. Purchasing those small business products made her feel better about herself (and a belief she was helping others continue this worthy mission), so she embraced the product and the mission of the business.

Let’s say that you’re selling a successful product with a primary (logical) benefit and also have a great branding message that goes along with the product. And something happens that changes the story (it’s now made offshore, etc.). The product is made with the same exacting standards. Should you now change the branding message and risk sacrificing your success?

The large corporations that Andrea mentions decided to keep the branding message and hide their affiliation. Andrea would probably not be as upset with the duplicity if the products had updated their story to say something like, “Making a well-intentioned product is only good if it also produces a good livelihood. We didn’t have the resources to share the product with the whole world, so we sold our company. We make sure that they are also putting the same quality into their product as we did (even at a larger scale). If enough people buy these high-quality products, increasing profitability, then companies will see the bottom-line and change their values as well.”

Remember that some buyers look for stories when considering products. Some buyers look for products when considering communities.When all things are equal with a product, people look for differentiators. Your well-crafted branding story can be a key differentiator to attract buyers.