Tag: Advertising

Stripped back

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

If you live in a western urban environs you’ve seen lots of bicycles of the ilk displayed below:

The single speed, fixed gear, mono color racer with white wall tires. Very hip, very now. But why?

It’s classic one downsmanship. In a world where people strive to have more, where increasing wealth has given many of us everything, the trend of tomorrow is diametrically opposed. The more of tomorrow, isn’t stuff, or consumption, rather experience, artistry and simplicity – the luxury of a stripped back existence. We often see these trends early in what may be considered the trivial, like bicycles. The trend will run much deeper than this.

Leading edge urbanites riding such bicycles (they are too cool for me) are showing the world they are more, but publicly displaying they can live with less. It’s a classic display of confidence.  By wanting less, they are showing the world that they are more. Conspicuous consumption has been a preferred method for people displaying self worth for most of the Post world war 2 era. But I really think that this is another example we’ve turned the corner.

The question for entrepreneurs is this: What category or business is waiting to be striped back by you?

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Web Success = Populate & Promote

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I recently saw a job posted on a web developer recruiting website. It involved some people looking for coders to make a copy of my web business and livelihood www.rentoid.com. What was interesting was the lack decorum shown in the coder recruiting process where the person said – build me a replica of this website. Here’s a screen print of it below.

I was a bit annoyed at first. and sent out a tweet to assess the mood of my army of advisers on twitter. I tweeted the following:

Not sure what to think of this? http://bit.ly/cYR5FI A compliment or IP rip off with me and @rentoid as the victims? Help! Thoughts?

The responses were varied, but all were within the theme of this person clearly does not get what it takes. Here’s some verbatim of the tweet responses:

xshay don’t worry about it – we saw a guy offering to build redbubble for < $1000 once. A) not going to happen, B) not about the tech

shandsaker same thing happened to us. Just be confident that $750 and a 2 line project brief is $750 better spent on beer 🙂

TimBull if they can only spend $750 to build it, quality won’t be there and they won’t stick it – betcha the coding was trivial part

BLKMGK01 Congrats man. Business must be huge if other people want to start ripping off ur ideas. U should apply to design the site! haha.

BrentHodgson Don’t let it worry you. You know that @Rentoid is more than the sum of its tech parts – & that it wasn’t a $750 job to create.

lukerides precisely…all about execution, so I would not worry…if they do a better job than you, they were always going to anyway!

I pretty much knew this before I tweeted the issue, but it did force me to think about web marketing success, and the success of rentoid to date and I came to the following conclusion. It’s not about the tech. In fact, the tech is pretty low down on the list of things needed for any website to succeed. And if i had to give my nemesis some advice on how to succeed in copying me it would be to do these two things:

Populate and Promote.

This is what needs to be done with any classified style website to succeed, and it takes a lot of time and investment. Investment in  financial and human capital. The problem with being 2nd, 3rd or later is that all the easy promotional opportunities like this are taken by the market innovator. And populating your website to make it meaningful takes a lot of boot leather, which is something many web entrepreneurs are afraid of.

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Good Guys, Smart Guys

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

♫ Come in and see the good, good good guys. Pay cash and we’ll slash the prices… ♫

If you live in Australia, you’ve seen the TV advertisement and heard the jingle. It’s a pretty simple proposition. It encourages customers to negotiate a price. I went to the Good Guys to buy a fridge and negotiate like everyone else does.

After we cut the deal and agreed on a price, I proceeded to pay in cash, when the sales guy said; ‘Credit card is fine. We are not that strict on cash payments these days.’ So I paid using my card.

It got me thinking about the truth of the Pay Cash and we’ll slash the prices tagline / tactic. It is a simple point of difference and traffic generator. The idea of the cash payment is really something that can only work on a micro level. A large retailer couldn’t dodge the tax man through taking cash payments and justify provide an unusually large discount. The supply chain has too many parties involved.  Rather, it is used to appeal the the customer who thinks they are getting a better deal by paying cash. It’s perception marketing. The insight for startups is this: if this works for the customer, that’s all that really matters.

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Nice idea, but what’s in it for us?

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I took this photo while shopping at Australian supermarket giant Coles yesterday.

I’ll start by saying not returning supermarket trolleys, or worse stealing them is not cool. It probably adds some cost to our grocery bills, albeit small.

But when I saw this poster up in my local Coles, I tweeted it and made the comment that it was reasonably amusing. Then Cameron Reilly, made what I thought was an insightful comment from a marketing perspective:

then I responded with this….

and Cameron finished it off with this 140 characters…

Which to be honest is probably the sentiments of most of Coles’ customers.

I’ll say it again – ‘Incentives shape behaviour’ – on this occasion there is no incentive for customers to care. How hard would it be for Coles to offer a shopping voucher for lost trolley returns? Or some other small incentive? In fact, it’s an insult to their customers to ask for help in a such a one sided manner. It’s very 1970’s marketing.

Startup blog says: respect your customers and reward the right behaviour.

Customer empathy

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

My cousin recently purchased a new home. For most of us such a large financial commitment is quite overwhelming.

During the settlement process Chris had a discussion with his conveyancer about the impending transaction and the issues in his mind. His conveyancer said:

“Look, I know this isn’t the type of thing you do everyday, but I do. And I’ll make sure it runs smoothly and you get looked after.”

Such a simple statement showed terrific empathy. It built confidence in the service provider, and eased the mind of the customer. It’s this type of language which creates conversations and can set apart entrepreneurs.

Language matters. What language do you use?

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Strategy review

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

In the new year we have new business goals and objectives. We plan to do better than last year. We plan to do more….. we must review our strategy…. But before we do we must ask this important question:

Did we execute the current strategy to its full potential?

Or did it just get a bit too hard and boring, and we decided it wasn’t easy enough?

Usually the strategy is fine, and we just haven’t worked hard enough to get through the dip.

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A great moment in advertising

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

There is a Nike commercial that was shot in Kenya with Samburu tribesman speaking in their native language Maa. The slogan “Just Do It” appears when the tribesman is talking. In reality he was saying, “I don’t want these. Give me big shoes.”