…it’s just business.
They made the decision as a vote of confidence against you. But they didn’t want to tell you the truth, so they just invented this cliché instead, so they could deceive you. So it must be personal.
People buy from people,
people sell to people,
people meet with people,
people talk to people,
people decide on people.
Business is people. So business is personal.
In Melbourne there’s a sporting club called the MCC. The Melbourne Cricket Club. Being a member gives you the rights to attend any sporting event at the MCG stadium (which seats 100,000 people).
Granted they are great seats to watch the football from. It also has a couple of restaurants and old school establishments within its confines. The membership costs about $500 per year…it’s nice enough.
There’s a 20 year waiting list to become a member of the MCC!
You need someone to die before they admit another member. People talk about how long they’ve got to go before they’re likely to become a reserve member.
It’s a rare business where making customers wait is part of the allure. Sure there’s a lot of history as the club is over 100 years old. I wonder how a start up with a premium / unique product could make ‘waiting’ a selling point?
Here’s an excerpt from today’s business section of the Sunday Age. A respected Australian broadsheet newspaper.
Correction
“Oops. Last week the story headlined ‘No More Living on Borrowed Dreams’ said household credit card debt was $4 million. The correct figure is $41 billion. The mistake was made by the reporter (who also choked on his conflakes on Sunday morning).”
What I like about this paragraph is it’s real. It sounds like a person wrote it. Not a public affairs department. They admitted they made a silly error which in my view makes them more reputable and trustworthy. Rare in large media organizations.
Start up lesson: People trust people more than they trust corporations.
“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it”
Antoine de Saint-Expery (author of the “Little Prince”)
There’s no shortage of really crappy consumer promotions out there. I blogged recently about budget airline Jetstar’s poor attempt here.
Win a car. Win a holiday. Conditions apply. Buy 3 years worth of our product to enter… need I continue?
Here’s some tips on running an effective consumer promotion:
Make it simple to enter
Make it free to enter
Make it a race
Make the prize unique
Make the prize the ‘users’ choice
Make it benefit your brand & the entrants
Don’t ruin it with terms & conditions
And here’s an example of the above which we have done for rentoid.
Feel free to enter.
‘God gave rock n roll to you’, but the rock band Kiss gave us much more than rock n roll – they gave us ‘theatre at transaction.’
It was the theatre Kiss gave us which in real terms transformed them from a band to a brand.
Consider the following classic KISS trademarks:
The face make up
The Logo
The flying Vee guitars
Gene Simmons breathing fire
Gene Simmons tongue
Gene Simmons vomiting fake blood
The intrigue, the mystery, the disgust….
These resulted in all sorts of spin offs like the Kiss dolls, Kiss comic books Kiss Coke bottles, the Kiss symphony orchestra concerts and even the Kiss army.
The gimmicks didn’t get them there alone, they had some great music. But maybe it was the above factors of the Kiss music experience that kept the band, sorry, ‘brand’ alive for the past 34 years!
We’ve all read the stories about how great start ups and emergent brands got their mojo. In hindsight it always seems so strategic, symmetrical and single minded.
This issue is hindsight. It will be something single minded and symmetrical that works. The problem is this: If we’re single minded from the start, and we get it wrong where does that leave us?
An old Chinese fishing proverb applies here: Cast the net wide.
Try everything.
Try everything quickly.
Find something that works.
Then stick to it in a single minded fashion.
Contrary to most modern marketing and entrepreneurial theories, we need to ‘get single minded, not start single minded.’
We never read about the 100 things any hero brand tried and failed with, only the winning strategy. So it all seems so perfect and well thought out. The truth is, most of the strategic wisdom arrives in hindsight. The more things we try, that greater probability we have of stumbling upon the right strategy – the one that works. But we should never fall in love with the plan before we commence.
It will all seem very strategic, symmetrical and single minded in hindsight.
