Category: startups

Blog action day

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Blog action day is cool. Here’s why:

It’s simple way to unlock the power of the blogosphere. It’s for a really good cause. One that people are happy to help, but often don’t know how. It’s a start up which is an event.

Here’s the idea:

From www.blogactionday.org

“On October 15, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic.”

They already have almost 6000 blogs committed to it. Including this one.

 

Simple idea, simple to do, big impact.

Let’s hope it spreads.

How to run a consumer promotion

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

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.

Theatre at transaction, again

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

‘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 clothing & boots

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!

The symmetry of hindsight

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

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.

Permission marketing in action

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I recently spoke about newspapers being a good forum for simple permission marketing.

We’ve just done exactly this for our start up rentoid. We approached the local western district newspaper called “the Leader” and discussed the community and environmental benefits of the rentoid service.

It worked and the article can be seen here.

The other reasons we started with a small newspaper is it’s in line with our clustering strategy and it gives us experience before we approach larger circulation media.