“When people expect me to go right, I’ll go left. I’m unpredictable.”
~Paula Abdul

Def Leppard’s Rock of Ages video introduction

Mutt Lange may be one of the most accomplished music song writers and producers you have never heard of.  He’s helped create the success of bands such as AC/DC with Back in Black  (approximately 22 million U.S. copies sold), Def Leppard with Pyromania (over 10 million U.S. copies sold) and of his former wife, Shania Twain with Come On Over (over 20 million U.S. copies sold).

Mutt Lange: Content Developer

If Mutt Lange were a content developer for your company, I bet he’d be worth his weight in gold in helping create remarkably sticky stories, videos and music.

While I am not an expert on his production techniques and since “he has not given an interview of any kind for decades,” what I’ve recognized about him is that he’s has mastered using the unexpected.   While there are many techniques he’s used to success, my two favorite examples are:

He starts songs with unusual sound combinations that grab your attention:

• Any rock music listener immediately knows the introduction to Hell’s Bells with its tolling church bell (a church bell in a hard rock song?!?);
• Any country & western listener immediately knows the introduction to Man I Feel Like a Woman! with its sing-song keyboard intro  + “Shania’s call “Let’s go girls” then cutting into an electric guitar pulse (a pulsing electric guitar in a C&W song?!?);
• And of course the introduction to Rock of Ages with it’s gibberish “gunter glieben glauchen globen”) followed by a cow bell overlayed with a funky drum beat (a cow bell and a funky drum beat in a hard rock song?!?)

He uses a call and response technique  that draws the listener in to participate

• Rock of Ages:  rock on / (rock on!) … What do you want? / (What do you want?!);
• Loverboy’s Lovin’ Every Minute Of It:  Ready (Ready!)-Aim (Aim!)-Fire

And almost without exception, the successful songs where he demonstrates these techniques end up sounding FUN and easily surprise and delight the listener.

Part of the fun also stems from the fact that heavy rockers such as AC/DC and Def Leppard have been convinced to take a risk with their sound and to break from a style that was common, expected, and what every other band in their genre was producing.  In doing so, they produce content (e.g., music) that gets noticed, that gets commented on, and that in the equivalent of their days, went viral.

Shania Twain portraying an unexpected gender role and smashing stereotypes about how a female country music singer should act

Roy Williams has written about the concept of surprising Broca’s Area in his book “Magical Worlds of the Wizard of Ads.” In short, Williams states that Broca’s Area is a sort of gatekeeper of the brain’s information gathering function.  Broca’s area anticipates the predictable and the only way to pass and gain attention is from the use of surprising and attention grabbing words and sounds.

The good news for you and me is that there are a wide range of successful people and businesses we can emulate.  These content developers take seemingly mundane activities and turn them on their ear to create unexpected, and often, remarkable content that their fans and loyal customers soak up and pass along to their friends.  For example:
•    Southwest Airline uses unexpected speeches to provide safety instructions ;
•    Seth Godin writes business management books that use peculiar language such as “lizard brain,” “linchpin,” “meatball sundae”  and “purple cow;”
•    Dyson makes vacuums that look like robotic equipment ;
•    Humphry Slocombe, an ice cream shop in San Francisco,  gives its flavors names such as Government Cheese, Foie Gras, Collaborative Evil Ale, Skull Splitter Root Beer, and Secret Breakfast (made from bourbon and cornflakes).

Where are the touch points with your customers that they’ve come to expect a routine from you, and how can you deliver some unexpected fun?  If you’re a retailer, you can do something as simple, yet powerful, as changing your menu design and layout.  You’d be amazed at how few of your regular customers bother to look at it anymore and how much you can change behavior significantly (upsell, cross-sell?) by featuring new items or delivering new messaging.

Using the unexpected to create surprise in the products you create, the names you give them, the titles you give to your blog posts, heck, even the ways in which you answer the phone, may feel risky to you.   And to some degree they are.   If you were to conduct market research to see if some of these changes are well received, you may get terrible purchase interest scores and decide that it’s not a smart idea, not brand consistent, not worth the risk.

But then again, if you keep doing the same things that your competitors do, you’re not really very different, are you?

Why not experiment, test, and measure the introduction of a little surprise in your content?  You and your customers might have a little more fun.

“Work is love made visible.”
~Kahil Gibran

Samovar Tea Lounge as a mission-inspired business

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.

Samovar podcasts at iTunes

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 customer reciprocates the love from Samovar Tea Lounge 

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”
~Galileo Galilei

I’m a firm believer that the key to marketing success is in uncovering a leverageable consumer insight.  Some people call this a consumer “wow,”  others the “big idea.”  Whatever you want to call it, at its basic level it is the key motivation that connects your products or services to deliver benefits to a consumer.  It’s the idea that makes your customers or prospects say “that’s exactly what I need.”

When I was a Brand Manager at Clorox, we had extravagant market research budgets and we constantly conducted primary research, both quantitative and qualitative in nature.  If we wanted to make sure that a change in the formula of Pine-Sol would not be noticed, we would conduct In-Home-Use-Tests (IHUT).  If we wanted to test a concept for a new Formula 409 product, we could conduct mall intercept studies in 8 cities and measure concept interest and purchase intent.  If we wanted to select the best ad against which to spend a multi-million dollar budget buying TV media, we would test ars persuasion scores.  Or if we just wanted to get further into the heads of charcoal users for Kingsford, we could spend a day at the home of a consumer in Detroit via ethnography studies.  The results of this spending and processes were deep consumer insights that resulted in delivering products and in creating advertising that persuaded consumers to buy.

Unfortunately, small business owners don’t have these kinds of luxuries.  Nevertheless, finding ways to get feedback from customers and prospects can make the difference in developing marketing programs that are powerful from those that fall flat.  With a little bit of planning, and some creativity, you can conduct low cost market research to help you uncover your own leverageable insight.

1. Analyze your yelp.com comments – I recently completed a project where I was able to unearth a wealth of information about a company just by reading, categorizing and trending yelp business reviews.  For this particular retail business, I categorized comments relating to a) product; b) value; c) assortment/inventory; d) customer service; and e) business concept.  I created charts from the data.  I created a rating system around the five business activities to give me insight into what customers were happy about and what they’d like to see improvement on.  And I ultimately drew conclusions about how to create new business initiatives and marketing programs;
2. Post questions in forums – Sometimes when I want to test an idea, or need the feedback from others around a business issue where I don’t have expertise, or where I’m unsure, I’ll post a question at a variety of internet forums or discussion boards.  For business issues, I post in LinkedIn Answers.  I’ve also posted questions at Yahoo Answers.  If you desire answers from a more targeted sample of your customers, you’re surely able to find industry specific forums such as for men’s clothing, restaurant and food issues or even mommies;
3. Create an online survey - If you have an email list from your website visitors, or fans on your Facebook page, or even twitter followers, you can ask them to complete a survey for you.  There are a number of free survey websites available such as surveymonkey.com, zoomerang.com and esurveyspro.com that allow you to ask a limited number of questions and either provide a link to take the survey, or to email the survey to respondents who volunteer;
4. Hand out paper surveys – If you operate a retail store, you can train your staff to ask customers to take a survey home with them and return it either in person or via the mail.  You might need to offer some type of small gift (a free cup of coffee? a 20% purchase discount?) to entice them to complete the survey, but it’s a variable cost that’s tied to the level of participation you achieve;
5. Host a focus group – I’ve seen savvy business owners invite their most loyal customers to visit and engage in a discussion about new product ideas, about service issues or other subjects that will help the business improve the customer experience.  Because you’re asking a customer to invest an hour or more of their time in helping you identify new ideas, you may want to spring for a catered meal and provide small gifts of appreciation at the end of the discussion;

What other ideas do you have to obtain inexpensive consumer insights?

“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

Be different

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

A clearly stated vision

“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

“Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.”
~Peter Drucker

It's Magic!

Implementing a powerful marketing campaign is easy.  Developing one is not.

The hardest, and most crucial part, of a powerful marketing campaign is in identifying what you can say that helps you connect to customers and prospects, that resonates so strongly with them and that is worth commenting about.  Being worth commenting about is the definition of “remarkable.”  Thinking is hard.  Thinking about what matters to your customers is harder.  Connecting your customers to your product with a powerful idea in a way that is remarkable is even harder.   But it has to be done.

Has it already been discovered?

What’s the powerful idea behind your marketing?

Too often a new business owner develops a product, starts a business, then hires a “communications” manager to find ways to market the product.

If the communications manager is good, she or he will embark on a process to define or clarify the product’s Unique Selling Proposition, or points-of-difference.  This process should almost always include finding ways to talk to customers and prospects to understand what it is about the product they like and what benefits its ultimately delivering.  Understanding what is different, persuasive and authentic/believable about a product is crucial in determining what to say in your marketing messages and ultimately in developing powerful marketing.

If the marketing manager is awesome, she or he will identify bigger or more persuasive benefits that the product could be delivering, and then champion a process of innovation within the company to improve the product or launch new products that deliver these benefits.  I believe this is one of the primary reasons the marketing profession sometimes gets a reputation among its cross functional peers as being disruptive.  Innovation and progress, depending upon how you look at it, can be subjective.

The effects of progress

But let me be clear here that innovation should only matter relative to the benefits you are delivering to your customers.  Without customers, a business does not exist.

If the communications manager is not so good, they are left with the often unenviable challenge of creating messages based on benefits that are already being delivered in the market, or worse, me-too features that do not connect the customer succinctly to benefits.  This is the aged old “lipstick-on-a-pig” conundrum.  They develop messaging that is flat and unispired.  They don’t really connect with customers.  And in the worst of all cases, they spend money just to demonstrate marketing activity to justify their jobs, or to allay stakeholders who are waiting for the marketing to come along and save them.

How are you innovating your business to uncover the next powerful marketing idea?

“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.

Yelp Party

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?

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
~George Bernard Shaw

Let’s Be Frank is a relatively new retail store in San Francisco’s Marina district.  In an increasingly competitive retail hot dog environment in San Francisco, Let’s Be Frank differentiates itself from the pack by selling grass-fed beef hot dogs and ingredients from locally produced suppliers, from vegetables to buns to ice cream sandwiches sold as dessert.  And like many forward thinking retailers, it’s already established a social media marketing presence with a Twitter profile and a Facebook fan page.

Let’s Be Frank recently created a promotion to achieve a goal of reaching 1,000 Twitter followers with an announced prize of 2 free 3-day passes to the Outside Lands Music Festival at Golden Gate Park on August 28-30 which has a value of $450.

Unfortunately, as of yet, the business has failed to achieve it’s goals, and quite frankly, looks in danger of not doing so by the time the festival occurs as it has added only about 100 followers since the promo was announced on August 14.

The great thing is, that Let’s Be Frank has created a promotion that has significant value.  The bad thing is that it’s execution is not accomplishing its objectives.

If I were in charge of running the promotion, here are some additional tactics I would use to accelerate the acquisition of Twitter followers.  Almost all of these ideas extend the messaging to additional media at a very low financial cost.  They merely take some planning and some time & effort.

1. Give good content: To date, most of the tweets and Facebook posts have been very narrow in scope, falling into approximately three content buckets: a) product descriptions; b) “help us to 1000 flwrs;” and c) “Twofer Tuesday” promos.  Why not also provide much more of the wonderful story-telling that makes this company different from the other dozen or more hot dog retailers in San Francisco?  I’d start by reposting the great content found at the bottom of its homepage which includes stories about the farms it buys from, press  coverage and video features, and then work to develop additional stories about its founders, its employees, its customers and any and everything that make this company unique.  Favorable customer reviews and tweets are also good ideas.  These are all of the assets that make this company different and worth following, and as a person who is passionate about local and sustainable foods, I KNOW there is a ton of material to share;
2. Follow new people: One of the most simple tactics to increase your Twitter following is to start following others.  So far, Let’s Be Frank is following only 68 friends and has added only about 30 since the promotion started.  Social media marketing works best when there is an open dialogue with your customers (for good and for bad).  Let’s Be Frank could increase its relationship building by asking its 368 Facebook fans to share their Twitter handles.  Then it could seek out new followers by following people who live within 5 miles of its zipcode.  To accomplish this, it could use any of the many services that help you identify Twitter users within a geographic area such as Twellohood, LocalTweeps, or TwitterLocal (this article identifies 9 potential services to use);
3. Send a press release to SF food blogs about the promotion:  Grub Street San Francisco, Eater SF, Bay Area Bites, and SFoodie are all blogs that report on the San Francisco Bay Area food scene.  Even with the demise of printed newspapers, bloggers still have the same needs as news reporters, and that is to find newsworthy stories to publish.  A press release is the way you can help them do their jobs with greater ease and thereby increase the odds that you will be mentioned;
4. Put a huge ad about the promotion on its website:  If you have news to share, why wouldn’t you share it on your homepage? Not only is it a way to keep your site content fresh and to give your visitors something to look forward to, but it’s another missed opportunity to communicate your offer in a channel that you control.  Check out how Peet’s Coffee is currently promoting its latest limited availability product offering;
5. Add its web url to its Facebook fan page: [this is the .5 idea] Let’s Be Frank could facilitate visiting the corporate website by adding a link within its Facebook fan page, as it does in its Twitter profile.  This could be a little more important than normal, given that its Twitter name is @letsbefranksf and its home page is www.letsbefrankdogs.com (not exacly the same);
6. Send out an email newsletter announcing the promotion: When I first visited the Let’s Be Frank website, I signed up to receive its newsletter.  To date, I’ve not received one.  An opt-in email list can be one of the greatest assets a retailer owns, if only it uses it wisely and to communicate its authentic story, news and increase value propositions (such as a chance to win $450 in concert tickets);
7. Pass out a slip of paper to every retail customer announcing the promotion:  I ate at the store yesterday, and while the store does have a whiteboard that said “follow us on twitter,” I was never informed of the promotion or chance to win $450 in concert tickets either verbally, or in any active way.  Handing a simple sheet of paper (also called a bag stuffer) announcing the promotion with my change could help spread the word among walk-in customers;
8. Have a easel backed display near the cash register announcing the promotion:  A counter sign, usually placed near the cash register, can also draw in the attention of walk in customers;
9. Partner with the Outside Lands Facebook Fan page to announce the promotion:  I don’t know whether this is feasible, but the festival has a Facebook fan page as well, with 13,654 fans!.  A request to share the promotion on the site could easily be accomplished with a quick email, or a guerrilla campaign where Let’s Be Frank posts a note to the Outside Lands fan page without permission could expose thousands of interested people to a way it could potentially receive free tickets to the event.

With just some more planning, a few more hours of work and the foresight to create an integrated campaign across media, I believe that Let’s Be Frank could have hit a home run with this promotion and easily achieved its goal of reaching 1,000 Twitter followers before August 28.

In the meantime, I’m going to go do my part to increase my chances of winning by retweeting “help us to 1000 flwrs @letsbefranksf! Once there, we’ll pick a random flwr for 2, 3-DAY PASSES to OUTSIDE LANDS-$450 value! Hurry!“

What other tactics would you recommend to help Let’s Be Frank achieve it’s Twitter follower goals?

“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.

“Persuasion is the centerpiece of business activity.”
“Story Telling That Moves People,” Harvard Business Review, June 2003: 1

Free sampling is an age old marketing tactic that often arises from the idea that a customer first needs to try a product to reduce the future risk of spending money to buy it.  McDonald’s is currently using this tactic to get its customers to try its new line of Mocha coffees (good through August 3rd by the way).

But as Robert Cialdini points out in his classic book Influence: The New Psychology of Modern Persuasion, trial tactics may actually carry a much deeper psychological connection that can help you sell more product via the concept known as reciprocation.

In short, Cialdini describes reciprocation as follows:

The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.  If a woman does us a favor, we should do her one in return; if a man sends us a birthday present, we should remember his birthday with a gift of our own; if a couple invites us to a party, we should be sure to invite them to one of ours.  By virtue of the reciprocity rule, then, we are obligated to the future repayment of favors, gifts, invitations, and the like.

Cialdini also goes on to describe how the rule is so powerful as a social construct that it can even create situations where the rule often produces a “’yes’ response to a request that, except for an existing feeling of indebtedness, would have surely been refused” and where “people we might ordinarily dislike – unsavory or unwelcome sales operators, disagreeable acquaintances, representatives of strange or unpopular organizations – can greatly increase the chance that we will do what they wish merely by providing us a small favor prior to their requests.”

Think about this! Cialdini asserts that you can persuade somebody to do something you want despite your request being one that the person would otherwise normally refuse or may be from somebody the person may not or does not even like.

Which brings us to Cialdini’s observations and examples of the Hare Krishnas.  He describes how the Krishnas, an Eastern religious sect comprised of “devotees – often with shaved heads, and wearing ill-fitting robes, leg wrappings, beads and bells” successfully grew in the number of followers as well as in wealth and property in the United States during the 1970’s.  He sets the situation for the successful reciprocation tactics that helped this group amass wealth by stating “The average American considered the Krishnas weird, to say the least, and was reluctant to provide them money to support them.”

So what did the Krishnas do to overcome this negative bias?

The Krishnas’ resolution was brilliant.  They switched to a fund-raising tactic that made it unnecessary for target persons to have positive feelings towards fund raisers.  They began to employ a donation-request procedure that engaged the rule for reciprocation, which … is strong enough to overcome the factor of dislike for the requester.”

The … strategy … involves the solicitation of contributions in public places with much pedestrian traffic (airports are a favorite), but now, before a donation is requested, the target person is given a “gift” – a book (usually the Bhagavid Gita), the Back to Godhead magazine of the society, or, in the most cost-effective version, a flower.  The unsuspecting passerby who suddenly finds a flower pressed into his hands or pinned to his jacket is under no circumstances allowed to give it back, even if he asserts he does not want it.  “No, it is our gift for you,” says the solicitor, refusing to accept it.  Only after the Krishna member has thus brought the force of the reciprocation rule to bear on the situation is the target asked to provide a contribution to the society.   This benefactor-before-beggar strategy has been wildly successful for the Hare Krishna Society, producing large-scale economic gains and funding for the ownership of temples, businesses, houses, and property in 108 centers in the United States and overseas.”

The natural lesson here is for marketers who develop “free sample” programs.  Cialdini addresses this directly with the following:

As a marketing technique, the free sample has a long and effective history.  In most instances, a small amount of the relevant product is provided to potential customers for the stated purpose of allowing them to try it to see if they like it.  And certainly this is a legitimate desire of the manufacturer – to expose the public to the qualities of the product.  The beauty of the free sample, however, is that it is also a gift and, as such, can engage the reciprocity rule.  In true jujitsu fashion, the promoter who gives free samples can release the natural indebting force inherent in a gift while innocently appearing to have only the intention to inform.  A favorite place for free samples is the supermarket, where customers are frequently provided with small cubes of a certain variety of cheese or meat to try.  Many people find it difficult to accept a sample from the always-smiling attendant, return only the toothpick, and walk away.  Instead, they buy some of the product, even if they might not have liked it especially well.”

I suspect McDonald’s knows this all too well.  By offering free samples of its Mocha and Iced Mocha beverages within its stores, it’s highly likely that the taster will also buy additional food.  I also  suspect that Monday was selected as a day of the week where sales are normally not as strong as other days of the week.

At the end of the day, that is the role of the marketing manager: to persuade people to become customers and to buy your products and services.  I highly recommend that you read (or re-read) Influence: The New Psychology of Modern Persuasion to gain additional insights into how you can refine your persuasion skills.

P.S.  Reading about Krishnas at the airport always reminds me of this scene from the 1980 movie Airplane.  Enjoy!