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.

A Tagline For A Cheerleading Gym?

Names + Taglines

We are looking for a tagline for our all star cheerleading gym. I was thinking of “Building Champions One Cheer At a Time”.

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Jay’s Answer: A tagline needs to appeal to your target audience. So, “Building Champions One Cheer At A Time” may work if you only communicate with cheerleaders who are looking for a boost. Otherwise, the tagline doesn’t work.

Some off-the-cuff suggestions:

  • Building Stronger Cheerleading Teams
  • The Gym Of Future Cheerleading Champions

How To Promote My New Social Networking Platform?

eMarketing, Starting Out

I wanted to solicit your opinion on how to promote a site that I recently launched: (www.goosca.com). This site is a social networking platform that allows its users to purchase real gifts for themselves or for other users (without knowing the recipients addresses in the latter case). Our company or affiliated vendors will do the delivery. Users who do not object to receiving gifts from others provide their addresses at the account registration time. These addresses will be kept confidential and will be used only for gifts delivery purpose. In your opinion, what would be the best way to promote the site and its ideas?

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Jay’s Answer: As you know, creating a new social networking platform isn’t hard – attracting people to it is. There are a huge number of sites competing for people (for example)

It appears that the sole purpose of the site is ultimately ecommerce (and the way you generate revenue) – sending/receiving gifts to people whose address you don’t know. Your privacy policy doesn’t adequately describe the safeguards you place for ordering and storage of confidential user information.. Also, sizing / color choices will be hard for people. Ideally, you want to say, send my new friend this thing, and have the friend choose the color/size to make sure the gift will be received in the spirit it was sent.

To build an online community, you first need critical mass – enough people online (of your target demographic) to attract more people of the same demographic via word-of-mouth. The first round can be your friends, people you know in a club, etc. You want a new visitor to visit and see lots of “action” online.

I’d strongly suggest teaming up with an existing networking site that already has active membership, and attempt to integrate your Goosca patent into their environment.

For a new business, it’s much easier to improve an existing offering than trying to create a new one from scratch.

Teaching Marketing In An Academic Setting

Starting Out

I obtained a degree in Marketing Management many years ago and all my work experience till now is related to marketing of various products and services. But now I am to take up teaching marketing as an academic subject in a local institution. Though I am sure I can take up most of the fundamentals in marketing individually as they come up, my area of concern is how to start the sessions.
I know we have to start with the definitions of term “marketing”, but what could be subsequent flow of topics session after session. The campus is a new one and most of the students in the faculty are freshers, who do not even know the a,b,cs’ of the subject..

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Jay’s Answer: First, your students need to see the bigger picture. Have them pick a company that’s familiar to them, and dissect it: R&D, marketing, advertising, sales, admin, etc. Don’t talk generalities, drill down to specifics. From there, understand how the marketing department interacts with the rest of the company. What are its needs? Why?

How Can We Organize Our Marketing Calendar?

Starting Out

When we launched our Ecommerce site our team consisted of 3 people. Now we have 5 people with 3 more scheduled to start by the end of the year. We currently use a basic excel spreadsheet to keep track of homepage updates, site page updates, emails, promotions, random web marketing and creative needs. With our new staff additions and ramping up our project list and updating our site more often we’ve come to a point where our current solution doesn’t allow for scalability. Any suggestions?

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Jay’s Answer: A simple solution would be to use Google Apps to create an intranet (for your internal collaboration). They offer both a free (ad-supported) and business (paid) edition.

Alternatively, create an internal wiki.

Finally, if you simply want to track projects, use a project management software solution such as Basecamp.

A French/Italian Name For My Weddings Shop?

Names + Taglines, Services

I need a business (french or Italian) name for a wedding decorations shop. Needs to be delicate & fun?

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Jay’s Answer: I hope these help your naming process:

Wedding Decorations:

  • d?©corations de mariage (French)
  • decorazioni di cerimonia nuziale (Italian)

A Loving Wedding:

  • un mariage affectueux (French)
  • una cerimonia nuziale amorosa (Italian)

Wedding Impressions:

  • impressions de mariage (French)
  • impressioni di cerimonia nuziale (Italian)

Your Special Day:

  • votre jour sp?©cial (French)
  • il vostro giorno speciale (Italian)

Ear, Nose, and Throat Booth Games?

Publicity, Services

I am looking for few new ideas that i can use for upcoming mega Ear nose and Throat conference in a local hotel. We have already confirmed a stall in the exhibition. I want some new idea to attract doctors towards the stall in the form of placing any game, computer game, or some thing new.

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Jay’s Answer: Before you create the “gimmick”, make sure that your offer/value of your product/services are top-notch. It’s not to your benefit to get lots of booth traffic only to wind up with no leads or lack of interest in your offering.

Obviously to play any of these games they need to provide contact info for follow-up.

  • Have a huge jar of small toy heads. Closest guess to # wins.
  • Any of the Exploratorium exhibits on hearing can be turned into fun games