Ideas Archives - Page 29 of 30

Radvertising – James Boag

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Here’s some more radvertising from local Tasmanian beer brand James Boag. Watch it, then I’ll tell you why it is radvertising:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xnc50XU8l1A]

Sure, it’s very entertaining, even funny. But as I’ve said many times before this isn’t why is ‘radvertising’, it’s because the creative idea is inextricably linked to the product…

Brand Heritage evident in the visuals and story
The core idea of ‘special water’ relates strongly to the brand and it’s Point of Difference
It’s conversation worthy, which means it’ll spread digitally, like it is right here on startup blog
And yes, it’s a joy to watch

The only negative, if there is one, is the potential for it to do a ‘category job’ for all beers Tasmanian, but that is inherent in their proposition and difficult to avoid.

The lessons for startups trying to create ‘radvertising’ is simple, make sure your ‘creative idea’ is linked the actual product.

The Feedback Trap

Posted on March 23, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

I recently heard an interview with the Drummer from band Midnight Oil, Rob Hurst. He was asked how he felt about a particular record which made it to number 1 on the US charts. His response was this:

‘We were too busy touring, putting on shows to follow the bands progress.”

It sounded as though serving the fans they already had was more important than gaining new ones. And guess what happens when we do that? Our reputation grows and more fans arrive, they find us because we are delivering something special to those who already appreciate what we are doing.

The formula for success is to continue to focus on delivering good stuff to those who already believe in you. To improve our delivery to them. Just like Midnight Oil was continuing to perfect the live performance of it’s songs. They weren’t worrying if their songs were good enough, they weren’t focused on external feedback from sources like sales revenue or chart positions. They ignored all feedback, except that from existing fans (customers). They didn’t get caught in the feedback trap.

So what are the feedback traps of the modern entrepreneur?
–   Website traffic
–   Google analytics
–   Facebook friends
–   Twitter follows
–   AC Nielsen data
–   Market share statistics
–   (Insert feedback mechanism here)

These tools can be useful, but they also tempt us to change tack. They tempt us into believing we are strategically wrong, because the feedback is so instant. Where as the benefits of our strategy is never so instant. Strategy takes time to work, it takes belief and patience, more over it takes ‘the real feedback’ cycle to spread before we can truly know if we have something. And the real feedback cycle is what our current customers have to say, and if they spread the word.

Startups out there – don’t fall into the feedback trap.

Zero Cost Advertising & Social Media

Posted on March 11, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

I’ve blogged before many times about how to generate brand awareness with limited or zero budget. The list of tools available is pretty long actually. No need to list them here – you know what they are. But to use them effectively takes two important ingredients:

Ingredient No 1: Frequency
If we think are are going to start a brand blog, a youtube channel, twitter account and all our communication problems will be solved over night, then we have really not understood what has happened with social media. If I was to summarize it it succinctly. I’d say – we’ve gone from a ‘produced’ world to an ‘organic’ world. The produced world took large capital investments. The organic world is free, but not everything grows, and those that do take time. It’s a lot like nature, free but time & frequency of events is the asset.

The more often we return to our crop and nurture it, the healthier the return we’ll get. Occasionally something will just click. We only have to do something ‘once’ and it will grow astoundingly with little input other than the raw ingredients. The market will take get hold of the communication and we’ll crack it – it’ll go viral. This is the anomaly – it happens so rarely, that we know about it every time. Best advice is to assume it wont happen to us.

Ingredient No 2: Patience
We don’t have to buy the communication asset. They’re here, we have been given them, but we have to work them. We need to allow time for our compound effort to accumulate. Be patient and trust that our continual effort and focus on frequency, will work in the long run.

Patience has something on its side that the old media world didn’t – digital foot prints. Our stuff stays on line forever. So when a passionate web surfer finds one of our things they like – they can do a back catalog on our stuff. This is when things can work, even months after launch date. A TV ad on the other hand has one shot at the eyeballs. If it’s missed by the target market, it’s all too late.

No doubt, we need to build great stuff for people to care, but in the new world of zero cost communications, Startups can can get it wrong and learn as we go.

Great work from Craig

Posted on March 7, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Here’s an example of why creativity beats a big budget every time. A very well executed ‘idea’ – I wont say campaign, or viral marketing ‘yet’. Sure, it’s gone viral, but I’m not yet convinced it is marketing…..which we’ll have a little chat about after you read the attached visuals:

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Clearly, this is some very clever and funny work. Engaging, entertaining and creates strong curiosity.

Yep, it’s gone viral, but is it marketing? I’d say not yet. Simply because effective marketing has to create a change in behavior, a call to some form of action, which this hasn’t done yet.

I can’t help but think that any added brand addendum in part 2 of the campaign will make it lose credibility almost instantaneously. To me it could work if it was Craig’s list – which would make sense, or maybe ‘Craig’ the local comedian doing some nice street level brand awareness bootstrapping. It will be interesting to see what this thing ends up being. It comes from this webpage: http://users.tpg.com.au/morepats/Craig/ – If any one knows be sure to share it with us.

So what’s in it for startups?

This campaign, proves that we can do really cool, engaging stuff for less than $1. in printing costs. It proves that media is ‘free’ for cool stuff. We just need to unlock our imagination.

New York Series: I like Dogmatic

Posted on February 23, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

I stumbled across this fast food place – good food quicky place in New York. It’s called Dogmatic, and they serve really nice gourmet sausages in bread. Really that’s all they do. Oh, and some some home made sodas.

dogmatic

What I really like is how simple the back end of their outlet is:

They cook different types of sausages.
Put all of them in the same type of bread roll
The bread rolls which are hollowed out simultaneously on a hot bread pole.
You choose a sauce(gourmet of course) and off you go.

Not only is the consumer end a great single minded proposition, the back end is too. Something few startups ever really recognize the benefits of.

Consumers only have 2 choices to make – Sausage type, and sauce flavour…. which are of the ilk of Pesto & Garlic – you get he picture. And so did I, so here they are:

This is the type of food idea with has a replicable formula. And it doesn’t have to be in a major populous like New York to work. It could work in pretty much any city.

So the question for entrepreneurs is this: Which food category will you spin, change and own in your startup?

New York Series: ‘Food Porn’ from Dean & Deluca

Posted on February 19, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

What is gourmet today, is mainstream tomorrow. We’ve already seen the gourmification (yes, I just made this word up) of products, including Chocolate, Yogurt, Soup, Coffee, Softdrink, Bread, and Ice-cream to name a few. So in the spirit of stimualting ideas for entrepreneurs, here’s yet another photo essay of the high end supermarket experience at the Dean & Deluca store in NYC.

It’s again clear that this photo set can do much more than more words:

The question for young entrepreneurs is this:

Which category in a boring old supermarket can you re-invent?

Maybe you can show some of the old boring food conglomerates like Kraft & Nestle how out of touch they are with emerging consumers and ‘real’ food values.

New York Series: idea from Starbucks

Posted on February 8, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

While in Starbucks I stumbled upon this cool little piece of branding. A branded chocolate coin:

Such a simple idea with relatively low cost. If you’ve got a small business or startup and you are handing out flyers or stickers, maybe a gold call will be more memorable, and leave a good taste in peoples mouths.