“In a world of ever-accelerating change, innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.”
~Skarzynski & Gibson in Innovation to the Core

Thinking is about imagining possibilities, of asking why and why not, of generating options for how to market your business.
Doing is about selecting options already identified and launching them the best you can.

Thinking is hard.  By thinking I don’t mean staring into a cup of coffee, or calling a meeting once a year to hold a brainstorming session.  I mean a committed process that systematically generates hundreds, if not thousands of ideas inspired by employees from all areas of the business, from suppliers, from investors, from partners, from customers, from fans, from different industries and even from competitors.  It’s colliding ideas that on the surface are not related, and in doing so, creating aha! moments, or an adrenaline rush associated with epiphany or serendipity.  It’s a journey that could include challenging orthodoxies, identifying discontinuities, figuring out how to apply organizational strengths in new areas and identifying deep consumer insights and unmet needs.
Doing is relatively easy.  There’s no shortage of ineffective marketing that each of us are exposed to every day.

Thinking helps you solve problems that nobody else thinks to solve that lead to breakthroughs and game-changing opportunities.  It’s the future.  It’s innovation. It’s growth and it’s success.
Doing helps you solve problems everybody has and helps you support current customers and employees.  It’s the here and now.  It’s generating cash flow and paying salaries.  It’s business as usual.

Both thinking and doing are necessary.

But do you have the right balance?

Are you sure?

“Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before.”
~Carol P. Christ
 

Diageo is a global liquor and spirits giant.

An orthodoxy is a widely held belief about what drives success for a company or for an industry.  For instance, you (or your management) may believe that:

• to grow your business means that you have to do so at the expense of your competition (grow market share);
• to maximize sales, you need to own the major holidays, events, or usage occasions;
• men are the purchase decision makers for your products at retail.

An orthodoxy is just a fancy term for prevailing wisdom, and it’s usually rooted in past experience.   After all, leaders of businesses, be them marketing leaders or not, usually gain their positions of influence through delivering past results.

But what would happen if you turned the words “past experience” into a negative?  Perhaps you’d call it a dogma.  Then what you would have is a “established belief or doctrine…[that] is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from, by the practitioner or believers.”

What then happens when some heretic within the company (our outside the company) suggests that you challenge the beliefs you and the industry hold so sacredly, or better yet, gains information that refutes them?  What happens when you gain information that suggests that the world is changing, or has changed right before your eyes?

What happens is that you unlock a new world of opportunity and you get to innovate!

Diageo is a $14 billion global company that owns and markets many of the #1 alcohol brands within various segments.  It’s brand lineup is staggeringly impressive:  Smirnoff is the #1 vodka in the world, Johnnie Walker is the #1 whisky, Jose Cuervo the #1 tequilla, Bailey’s the #1 liqueur,  and Guinness the #1 stout.  

Diageo Expects Sales Growth After Focusing on Shoppers

Rather than resting on its laurels as the undisputed industry leader, 3 years ago, Diageo embarked on a mission to better understand who buys these products, why they buy them, and just as importantly, what stops them from buying them.  It created a shopper marketing team that set out to deepen its understanding of consumer shopping behavior.

Generating new consumer insights is not the only way to challenge your orthodoxies, but it’s a foundational marketing practice that often will.

So what did Diageo learn that were assuredly “aha” moments within the company?

• Women are the primary shoppers for spirits and liquors, not men, as had been assumed;
• People buy spirits and liquor for special occasions, but they define special occasions much more broadly and frequently than holiday and birthday celebrations, as had been assumed.  Informal, spontaneous group events such as dinners, porch parties, or backyard grilling were just as likely to drive purchase occasions;
• Many people are intimidated to buy spirits and liquors because they don’t have a go-to repertoire of cocktail recipes.  They don’t know what complimentary products they would need to be able to serve a cocktail to a friend or guest;
• Beyond the consumer insights, Diageo also learned to better understand its retailer’s needs in selling and marketing its products, that they were willing to partner to sell the category, rather than to assume its dominant position allowed it to assert is clout.

These new insights then led to a wide variety of programs that were tested with its retail partners and validated in market.  They include:

• Supplementing big holiday events where spirits and liquor are traditionally purchased with more year-round marketing;
• Development of programs to educated and take away the intimidation factor, such as “Simply Cocktails” which is a display and merchandising area where consumers are given options in how much complexity they are willing to use in order to create a cocktail;
• Diageo has increased the tools available to retailers to help them succeed in this category.  For instance, they provide food pairing and cocktail suggestion ideas that many consumers seek before they begin a shopping trip and when they visit the retailers’ website.   Additionally, retailers have the option of customizing the displays or using their own nomenclature, and selecting merchandising modules that fit their store size.

So what have been the results?

• Diageo says that it’s seeing double digit growth in its brand sales;
• It also says that it’s growing overall category sales, which its retail partners no doubt care about more;
• Presumably, as reflected in more sales, consumers are realizing the benefits of these programs, and ultimately, when you make your consumers happy, they reward you with sales.

Marketing has been changing rapidly as consumers gain greater control of the messages they are willing to listen to, in their ability find the information that’s important to them, and then to spread ideas and information through social media and word of mouth. 

Are you learning from your target customers how you can connect with them in more valuable ways, and in doing so, being open to challenging your own orthodoxies? 

 

“Strategy is doing the right things. Tactics is doing things right.” ~various attributions, including Peter Drucker and paraphrased from Sun Tzu I recently posted a series of slides from prominent social media thought-leaders as to why social media is not a retail marketing strategy. The point was not to diminish the potential value of social media or inbound marketing, for there are considerable benefits to be realized. Rather, my point was to assert that the use of social media and inbound marketing tactics can benefit tremendously by being used to support general marketing strategies and online content strategies. Starting your marketing efforts with well thought out strategies will help you manage limited resources, help you understand what’s driving success and failure, and accelerate success by unlocking the creativity that exists within your organization.

Goals, strategies and tactics

Before you can speak intelligently about the differences between strategies and tactics, you first need to start with the purpose of having strategies and tactics.  The biggest reason is to help you achieve a goal. A goal is a specific result that your business needs to achieve in order to sustain itself, usually through revenue growth or expense reduction, but also sometimes in terms of market share or cash flow.  A goal is more often than not a financial measure, should be your measure of what success looks like, and it should be S.M.A.R.T.  (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Time-bound).  Often, multiple goals are established to reflect the various ways a business can succeed. For example, let’s say you operate a chain of grocery stores.  The following could be goals for you to achieve:

• Grow meat department sales by 20% by Fiscal Year End 2011;
• Increase average purchase value from $75.00 to $85.00 by Fiscal Year End 2011;
• Increase the purchase frequency of shoppers from every 10 days to every 8 days by Fiscal Year End 2011.

I’ve previously written about how you can frame your thinking around ways to grow revenue. Strategies are statements of how you will achieve your goals. They are high level ideas, usually long term in nature, that set the direction and scope of a business to achieve its goals. In military language, “divide and conquer” is a strategy that is likely to be in place over the course of a military campaign. “Paratroopers secure the airport” is a tactic that is likely to happen once as part of the way a force divides and conquers. Great marketing strategies are focused on delivering benefits or in meeting the needs of its customers, and are often based upon information, research, trends, and insights generated through the analysis of markets, customers, non-customers and competitors. How are you going to get your target customer to spend money with you?  What benefits are you going to deliver to them? Just saying that you will use social media or inbound marketing isn't going to be a sufficient reason for you to persuade and succeed. Philip Kotler from Kellogg Business School has recently said that the role of marketing is to C.C.D.V.T.P (Create, communicate and deliver value to a target market at a profit).   Creating value for a target market requires you to understand what the target market values, so in essence, a strategy is a connection between your goals and delivering a value, or a value proposition, to a customer.  A value proposition is defined as “a powerful emotion evoking statement that validates a customer’s unmet need and instills confidence that this unmet need till be totally satisfied (by you and your company).” I always advocate that businesses craft strategy statements using following the formula as it connects a goal to a value delivered to a target: Returning to our grocery chain example, the following could be strategies to achieve one of the previously stated goals:

• Grow meat department sales by creating smaller package sizes to meet the weekly cooking needs of single (unmarried) shoppers [who frequently eat at restaurants]; or
• Grow meat department sales by creating a line of ready-to-cook entrees to address the time constraints of busy moms; or
• Grow meat department sales by offering butchering classes to educate “foodie” customers on unusually found cuts of meat;

Presumably these strategies would have evolved from a deep understanding of various buyer personas, but the point is that now you have some overarching themes around which to build your marketing tactics and this is where your marketing creativity can begin to flourish, where you can start dedicating resources to developing online content around these strategies and themes, and gain the benefits of social media such as establishing authority, credibility and trust. So then what are tactics? Simply stated, a tactic is an action you take to execute a strategy. Examples are TV advertising, newspaper advertising, retail promotions, a website page, a banner ad campaign, a sampling program, etc.  Without the context of a strategy, in and of themselves they lack meaning as to how they will benefit your business. Getting back to our grocery store example, some tactical ways you could support the strategy to grow meat department sales by creating smaller package sizes to meet the weekly cooking needs of single (unmarried) shoppers could be:

• Advertise in weekly advertising circular;
• Put up shelf talkers or signs in the meat department;
• Run a retail promotion;
• Publish a single serve recipe book;
• Sponsor a speed dating event;
• Run a co-promotion with a brand of wine;
• Create an email newsletter;
• Create online content around the shopping and lifestyle needs of the single customer;

I want to highlight this last idea because I believe it brings me full circle to the point about social media not being a strategy, but it does highlight how social media or inbound marketing could be used to deliver a compelling series of messages to a strategically identified customer segment around a well-researched need. Without the context around who you are talking to, what needs, wants, dreams and desires they have, and how you can address those needs, wants, dreams and desires, social media will be underutilized by you and your business and the limited resources you dedicate to it will likely fail to help you achieve the business goals that will sustain you. As Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman say in their book “Content Rules:

That’s precisely the point of creating killer content – to convert browsers into buyers and customers into regulars or (better yet) rabid fans, ambassadors, and advocates. You do that by deepening your relationship with them, over time, by repeatedly and consistently creating content that they care about and want to share freely with their friends or colleagues, and by encouraging them to engage with you and to sign up for things you publish, (like an email newsletter or a webinar) or to download a whitepaper or ebook.

In order to use social media and inbound marketing to accomplish this, you need to start with customer-centric strategies.

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.  Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." ~Sun Tzu Social media is a strategy no more than a telephone is a strategy. Social media facilitates conversation: between you and your customers, you and your prospects, you and your competitors, even you and your employees and you and me.  But conversations don’t pay your rent, don’t pay your employee salaries, don’t pay for your marketing expenses, and don’t make your cash register go Ka-Ching! I’ve been wanting to write about this subject for months, but I always filter myself and suffer from comparison to what I’ve read other smarter, more well established experts write on the subject.  So rather than try to say something different, I’ve decided to compile some of my favorite words of wisdom from others on the subject. Paul Isakson, Founding Partner at Thinkers & Makers, LLC  @paulisakson Jeremiah Owyang, Partner of Customer Strategy at Altimeter Group  @jowyang Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs @chrisbrogan Mike Volpe, VP Marketing Hubspot  @MVOLPE Brian Solis, founder & principal of FutureWorks  @briansolis Adam Broitman, Partner and Ringleader at Circ.us    @adambroitman From Find the Risk vs Reward Balance in Social Media, Gerardo A. Dada & Greg Stahovec

What are you doing to convert your fans and followers into customers?

If you need help integrating your social media efforts into a strategic plan, schedule a FREE 30 minute consultation with me.

“Work is love made visible.” ~Kahil Gibran Increasingly, mission-inspired businesses are being created by entrepreneurs who see business as an effective way of creating positive social change.  Samovar Tea Lounge, based here in San Francisco, appears to be one of these companies. With a clearly articulated and extremely audacious mission and values statement that claims:

At Samovar, we are in the business of true, deep, positive human connection, aka Love. ..Tea, food, teaware, snacks, sweets, and treats are all just vehicles for connecting us, first to ourselves, and then to those around us.

the company has created a powerful unique selling proposition, that when combined with hard work, product innovation and a shared belief system among its employees and customers sets the foundation for the elements required to create a differentiated, successful and growing retail business. The photo above is from an email newsletter from Samovar.  Instead of the traditional promotional offers, coupons, recipe ideas or free shipping announcements found in most retailer email newsletters, Samovar used the majority of the email to share 6 beliefs that were generated as a result of an employee meeting.  The first belief states:

To live life to the fullest means making the biggest impact we can, with our limited time here on earth.  Creating a momentous impact starts with Love.  First for ourselves, and then for others.  Let it flow.

Before you react that this must be some kind of church run operation or surely just an eclectic group of twenty first century hippies on the fringe of business success, note that Samovar’s founder Jesse Jacobs opened his first store in 2001, and has opened new stores in 2006 and in 2009.  Inc. magazine reported that it has increased revenue from $700,000 in 2005 to $2.3 million in 2008 and had a 230% growth rate.  The company’s customer reviews at Yelp are strong  and it’s seemingly not only innovating products but also in marketing by generating a wide variety of content in the forms of email newsletters, educational podcasts on ITunes and video tea tips.  It even hosted a recent live streaming webinar of Tea & Wine Pairings with Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library, and Kevin Rose of Digg.com. It’s clear that there are many companies that aim to use their businesses to create positive social change. Many do so by helping charitable organizations with dollars or volunteer hours.  Some do it by attempting to reduce its environmental impact by reusing boxes to ship e-commerce orders.  But in this case it’s not so much the specific initiatives the company takes, but rather how bold it is to clearly state that it’s in the business of love and that its primary operation is merely a way to facilitate human connections. If creating and building an enduring brand is about creating an emotional connection with its customers, and if the savviest marketers understand that successful products (and companies) appeal to the heart, not the mind then what stronger way to accomplish that than through love? I can tell you why love doesn’t make it into strategy discussions more often.  It’s because “the word love freaks out businesspeople.” Fortunately there are business leaders such as Mark Sanborn, who recently published a manifesto at changethis.com titled “The Four-Letter Word That Makes Your Work Irresistible,” and who in it provides a framework for how to think about and apply the concept of love to the business world.  And there is Isabel Parlett who teaches entrepreneurs to dig deeper than the Language of Information with its descriptions of mere features and benefits in order to develop a Language of Connection to articulate and integrate “the biggest, deepest message” owners are here to share. It’s got to be hard work and to some degree a leap of faith to say you’re in the business of creating love through deep, heartfelt connections instead of just selling a product or service.

But if you could do it, how many of your competitors could compete effectively against a company of love?

"A commodity is some good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market." ~Wikipedia "The brain is a commodity used to fertilize ideas." ~Elbert Hubbard Powerful marketing can come when a business creates alignment of a shared vision between owners, employees and customers .  It can also come from product differentiation. I believe that even if you sell a commodity product, there are ideas you can develop to bring differentiation to them. Let's face it.  Most small businesses sell me-too products, products that are in essence undifferentiated.  But it doesn't have to stay that way.  With a lot of thought, maybe even a lot of work, I'm a firm believer that any business can innovate to transform a commodity product or service into a differentiated product. The following businesses are in essence selling commodities.  But look at what they've done to create differentiation in their products.  Either they are solving a problem that the product itself creates (ex- water bottles are made from petroleum and their disposal adds toxicity to landfills), they've extended the service to provide additional benefits (free pick-up and drop off), or they've wrapped a values based story around the product (100% sustainable urban warehouse farm). BTTR Ventures – This startup in Berkeley California has created a unique, closed loop production model that converts one of the largest waste streams in America – the tons of coffee ground waste generated daily – into a valuable, nutritious product: gourmet, specialty mushrooms that it sells to Whole Foods, at Farmers Markets and online. By creating a 100% sustainable urban warehouse farm, it has a built in values based story that will get noticed. NOTE:  BTTR is a finalist for the BBC World Challenge as a small business that has shown enterprise and innovation at a grass roots level.  You can vote for them here. Wild Boar Farms – Heirloom tomatoes are already different from the garden-variety tomatoes found at most grocery stores.  Yet that's not good enough for Brad Gates at Wild Boar Farms.  Brad grows some of the most outrageous tomatoes available on the planet by constantly creating new varieties using heirloom genetics and mutations.  He focuses on bi-color and striped varieties with extreme flavor and fascinating looks and gives them Bay-Area centric names such as the Berkeley Tie-Dye, Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye, and the Michael Pollan. Plant It Water – The first time I ever drank bottled water was on a trip to Indonesia where travelers have health concerns about drinking from the local water supply.  Today, portable water is a big convenience to people on the go.  As this category has grown, however, so has the landfill waste stream of petroleum based plastic bottles.  Plant It addresses the problem by using packaging that is sustainably manufactured, recyclable, and that uses 60% natural resources such as plant fibers.  Plant It also supports environmental organizations and is currently planting a tree for every carton sold. Keatley Detail – Keatley is a business that cleans, polishes and waxes automobiles.  Like most service businesses, it's reputation rests on doing a great job and living off word of mouth referrals.  But Keatley goes the extra mile by making it easy to do business with them.  It offers customers free pick-up and delivery.  It allows for online scheduling.  It has a business center with wi-fi where customers can work while the car is being cleaned.  And it offers free beverages in the business center.  In essence, it has taken away any possible reason that an interested prospect might have for not using Keatley.  And that's a powerful statement to be able to make. Rock & Roll Dentist -  I previously wrote about this example of another service business.

How are you bringing differentiation to your products or services?

“Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your Vision is the promise of what you shall one day be. Your Ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.” ~ James Allen "Chase the vision, not the money…if you are actually chasing the vision and not the money, the money will follow because your customers and employees will be able to sense your passion, and they will want to help you succeed." ~Tony Hsieh, founder, Zappos "Milton Friedman said the only reason a corporation exists is to maximize the return of the shareholder. Forget that. Do this instead: Put the employee first, and that employee will take better care of the customer than anyone else." ~Kip Tindell, founder, the Container Store "I think that marketing is the art of telling a story to a consumer that they want to hear that lets them persuade themselves that they want to buy something." ~Seth Godin

1. Clarify your vision
2. Hire people who share your vision
3. Identify customers who share your vision
4. Tell stories about how you're jointly (company + employee + customer) pursuing your shared vision

"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself." ~Peter Drucker Yelp is hiring a Director of Local Business Marketing and challenges this person to use outbound marketing tactics such as direct mail, Search Engine Marketing and enhanced tools for its sales force in order to accomplish its goal of acquiring thousands of new SMB customers. Rather than hire a marketer who puts lipstick on a pig and tries to implement marketing tactics to sell a service that many businesses are frustrated with, I think that yelp's big opportunity is to innovate its services in a way that provides far more value to SMBs and business owners than it currently does. The "secret sauce" that founder Jeremy Stoppleman discovered while building yelp was that he could make the site popular and sticky by attracting and nurturing a core group of fanatic reviewers (called the yelp elite squad) and by building community among all reviewers.  “Yelp is about the reviewing experience,” Mr. Stoppelman has said. “It is like a blog with a little bit of structure.” And for those businesses that have been awarded a strong review by an influential yelper, they've often witnessed tremendous customer growth. The reputation of yelp among many small, local businesses, however, has not always been positive. This reputation has been based upon ongoing stories and accusations by business owners of aggressive sales tactics), a relative high cost as compared to AdWords and selective display of reviews which yelp has directly and repeatedly denied. I personally think that yelp in its current state can be a tremendous resource for business owners.  Being able to capture consumer feedback and insights without having to spend money for focus groups or other research studies should allow owners to identify ways to improve its operations in order to make its customers happier. But the simple fact of the matter is that "Stoppelman [has] said that the site deliberately tilts its rules to support the reviewers. 'We put the community first, the consumer second and businesses third.'  Under the current business model, businesses are the primary source of revenue and yelp should work to improve its product and services so that business owners find even more value than it currently does. So how can yelp expand its paying advertising base of SMBs in the face of poor product reputation?  In my opinion, sales people armed with better sound bites, more colorful collateral and a special offer to florists in the month of November are not the way to significantly accelerate the acquistion of new SMB clients.  SEM?  I'd be highly surprised if a business owner visits Google to search "San Francisco advertising options." Beyond the basic advice of better educating business owners to how it can use yelp in its current state to receive and use consumer feedback, what I believe yelp needs to do is to innovate its offering to develop and launch information & services beyond customer reviews and ratings that help local business owners better manager their business.  The following ideas are what I believe yelp should put into development. Provide business owners with information & tools that helps them operate more effectively – This could take several different forms:

1. Capture additional information in the review system to identify how a reviewer learned of business.  Every business owner wants to know which of its advertising vehicles was responsible for generating awareness and trial.  What if yelp could show a business that a yelp review, rather than a google search was responsible for increasing traffic?
2. Offer reports (for a fee) that summarize a businesses reviews into actionable categories.  I’ve recently spent hours cutting and pasting the reviews of a client so that I could identify where opportunities to improve customer satisfaction exist.  I’ve had to manually categorize feedback in terms of pricing, product quality, product assortment, customer service, and overall business concept in order to draw conclusions on what part of the businesses operations deserve more in-depth review.  yelp could do this for me and I’d probably pay for it;
3. Offer reports that make comparisons of various metrics across competitors, against defined industry segment, etc.  This could help an owner determine whether it’s doing well or poorly versus competition;
4. Conduct research studies that help business owners use yelp tools.  This could be a study that shows the greatest impact on sales of displaying a Yelpers Love Us sticker, or the increaseed redemption rate of a direct mail piece that features a yelp review;
5. Develop a B2B review section where owners can share reviews of vendors and suppliers so that they can make informed choices;
6. Create widgets of a customer's reviews that can be placed on customer websites.  At some point in time, businesses are going to realize that having negative reviews of its products and services can often lead to increase sales;

Celebrate small businesses – At some point in time yelp needs to change the perception that it's holding business owners at gun point and instead embrace them as valuable, paying customers.

1. Host business owner seminars to educate owners, to solicit feedback and to identify new ways that yelp can help them grow their businesses;
2. Develop a yelp video channel to feature successful businesses (or even businesses that the elite squad loves).  Business owners crave seeing success stories of other small business owners;
3. Create a blog about businesses who are seeing success using yelp.

What other ways can you think of for yelp to increase its value among SMBs?

"All progress occurs because people dare to be different.” ~Harry Millner I bet that a dentist who created a themed environment in his or her office, one that gave its customers a greater semblance of comfort or familiarity, would do a lot better than your me-too, copy cat dentist who promotes the same benefits as other dentists (e.g., a beautiful smile, convenience, personalized attention and a comfortable experience).  The theme would tap into the passions of like-minded clients and offer them enough attraction (and distraction) to help alleviate any of the commonly held fears that visiting a dentist creates in the minds of clients. It could be a rock-and-roll theme (the Hard Rock Cafe of dentists?);  it could be a sports theme (the Sports Clips of dentists?); it could be a comedy theme (the icanhazcheezburger of dentists?);  it could be a garden theme, or a movie theme (select the video of your choice).  The point being is that if  "5-8% of Americans avoid the dentist out of fear," and as many as "20% experience enough anxiety that they will go to the dentist only when absolutely necessary,"  a dentist who created an office theme where its customers were in an environment of their choosing and that gave them a greater sense of control and of comfort, THAT, I bet, would create customer loyalty and word-of-mouth referrals. two dentists located 2 blocks apart – how would you choose? Unfortunately, most dentists make it virtually impossible for prospective clients to differentiate between their options, and I'd go so far as to suggest that they are competing on so-called benefits that are either not believable or important.  Aside from visiting a dentist for a teeth whitening treatment, do people really expect to improve a smile, or rather are they trying to minimize the risk of future pain and suffering (or in case of an emergency, alleviate current pain and suffering)? Convenience?  Even with a dentist who offers the rare weekend or evening appointments, my experience has been that you need to book months in advance to secure one of those coveted times. Personalized attention?  As opposed to what?  Working on somebody else's teeth?  A comfortable experience?  Prove it! and a big chair isn't proof enough. When I first moved to San Francisco, a co-worker recommended a dentist who she called the Rock-and-Roll dentist.  Leon Feldbrill adorned his walls with posters from concerts at the famous Fillmore Auditorium, he had an extensive collection of rock industry magazines in the waiting room, he played concert videos on TVs within eye sight of the patients, he advertised on the most popular rock radio station in town, and if asked, he was always willing to talk about concerts and bands that he liked.  He could have easily extended the idea to give away concert tickets to his clients, or if social media marketing were around back then, create a radio station to share at blip.fm. He was a truly memorable dentist that created a differentiated dental environment. Unfortunately, Dr. Feldbrill sold his practice about 8 years ago.  I don't remember the name of the dentist who bought it, but he has since sold to another dentist who has owned the practice for the last 3 years.  I don't remember his name either.  Both of the subsequent owners bought some equipment and a list of customer names, but haven't done anything of note that would lead me to recommend the practice to a friend or neighbor. But if I could find a dentist who displayed sports memorabilia and let me watch Sports Center on ESPN, or who created a fantasy sports league among his or her clients, or who let me play sports trivia on a television while working on me,  now that sounds like a dentist I might get excited about.

“If we’re growing, we’re always going to be out of our comfort zone.”
~ John Maxwell

From a mathematical point of view, there are only three ways to grow revenue:
1)    Increase customer count
2)    Increase purchase frequency
3)    Increase average purchase price

This falls out from the basic equation of:
# customers X purchase frequency X average purchase price = TOTAL REVENUE

If you start with any one of these three goals in mind, it will help you more clearly establish strategies to help you grow, rather than chasing the latest trend or tactics which may or may not lead to growth.  Always remember to start with a strategy before choosing your tools or tactics to achieve it, rather than the other way around.  It will force you to be more rigorous around your planning, more efficient with your limited resources, and more effective when you implement your programs.