What, exactly, is marketing?

I was a panelist at a writers’ conference marketing seminar when someone tossed that question at me. I gazed at the sea of 300+ faces and my mind went utterly blank.

“Uh…marketing is all the stuff you do to help you sell your product or services,” I stammered.

Not an academy award-winning performance by any standards. And the marketing theorists would shoot me for being so simplistic. But I’m a strong believer that simpler is better, so let’s set aside the theoretical jargon and talk trash.

“All the stuff.” What does that include? Lots of stuff, as it happens, but let’s home in on just one:

Focus on your customer. If you forget everything else, remember to always, always, always focus on your customer.

• What does your customer need? Want?
• What will delight your customer?
• What will surprise him or her?

If you think in terms of what’s going to make your customer happy (and not what you can get out of selling your product), the rest of the stuff tends to fall into place.

An interesting article in Christianity Today points out the importance of focusing on the customer. The article’s title introduces the customer-orientation premise:

“How to Save the Christian Bookstore (Hint: Stop making it so religious).”

What? A non-religious, religious bookstore? Do tell!

Christian bookstores that are thriving are connecting with their customers by becoming “third places”—inviting, comfortable alternatives to home and the workplace.

A bookstore in Bentonville, Arkansas, has 10 TV screens that loop skateboard and snowboard videos with Christian themes, offers free wi-fi and a coffee and smoothie bar. Not only that, the store has a “build your own board” area and sells custom skateboard parts.

Sure, the store sells Bibles, books, and music. But the owner says, “The core is the ministry—changing lives. SKIA is where you can come and be ministered to when the church is closed.”

Focus on your customer.

A California-based Christian bookstore chain caters to the 18- to 30-year-old crowd, selling alternative clothing at its retail stores, as well as wholesale and via the Internet. The stores are located in prime-time teenage hangoutville: malls.

Focus on your customer.

Where’s your marketing focus? Are you obsessed with dreaming up a great brand tagline that’s sure to “wow” your customers? Or are you most concerned with the customers themselves, and their needs?

Focus on your customer, and the other stuff will fall into place. In the next post, we’ll explore more of the “other stuff.”

Source: Crosby, Cindy, “How to Save the Christian Bookstore,” Christianity Today magazine, April 2008.

Also in this series:

• 10 Marketing Lessons from a 12-year-old Entrepreneur
• What’s Your Passion?
• 5 Tips for Becoming an Expert at Your Craft
• 5 Ways to Stay Motivated
• Get Them in Your Gravity Well
• Grass Roots Marketing
• What is Your Product Worth?
• Business Card Marketing
• Make It Easy for Customers to Purchase Your Product
• Yellow Page Advertising: Waste? Or Found Wanting?
• Yellow Pages, Revisited
• The Law of Line Extension
• When Line Extension Works
• Invest Your Business Profits Wisely

Tags: customer service, HeBlogsSheBlogs.com, marketing lessons

What is your product worth?

The simple answer: Whatever someone will pay.

The complex answer: The Goldilocks’ price. Not too much, not too little.

When blue jeans were first introduced in Japan the manufacturers wanted to create a market. So they priced the jeans at $5.00 a pair. They were a bargain. They didn’t sell. They took them off the market for a time then reintroduced the jeans at $25.00 a pair. They sold out.The buyers figured at $5 the jeans weren’t worth much. But if they were $25 a pair they must be a must-have item.

You’ve heard the cliché, perception is reality. It’s often true, especially in marketing. Most people understand private labels. Stores contract with a supplier to have a product manufactured, then put their own name on the packing.

Let’s use frozen vegetables, and the Safeway chain of grocery stores as an example. Safeway has their own brand of frozen corn, peas, carrots, etc. Next to Safeway’s brand are the national brands. Which cost more? The national brands, of course. Is the corn in Safeway’s bag or can identical to the corn in the national brand’s bags? Of course. Do the people handing out extra money for the national brand think the national brand’s corn is better? Of course. Is it better? Of course not.

But that’s marketing. That’s figuring out what your product is worth. Some people are willing to pay for the brand name on the packaging.

There isn’t time to go into all the complexities of how to figure out exactly what your price point should be. But to start ask these questions:

Who is my target? Upscale? Then I can charge more. The masses? I’ll need to charge less.

What do people think my product is worth? Take a survey. Ask friends, neighbors, people waiting at the bus stop. Set your price and start selling. The market will quickly tell you with real dollars what your product is worth.

Daniel figured it out, so can you.

Also in this series:

• 10 Marketing Lessons from a 12-year-old Entrepreneur
• What’s Your Passion?
• 5 Tips for Becoming an Expert at Your Craft
• 5 Ways to Stay Motivated
• Get Them in Your Gravity Well
• Grass Roots Marketing
• How to Market Your Product
• Business Card Marketing
• Make It Easy for Customers to Purchase Your Product
• Yellow Page Advertising: Waste? Or Found Wanting?
• Yellow Pages, Revisited
• The Law of Line Extension
• When Line Extension Works
• Invest Your Business Profits Wisely

Tags: HeBlogsSheBlogs.com, marketing lessons, price points

Tell everyone about your product. Everyone. Everyone. Everyone! (Yes, I’m repeating myself at the risk of being crude—thank you very much Paul Simon.)

People or companies wanting to promote themselves often focus their energy primarily on mass media—getting the word out through radio, TV, newspaper, the Internet, direct mail, etc., while neglecting their friends, family and neighbors. Why? They think friends and family represent only a small number of people, and what difference can that make? All. The. Difference.

As we talked about earlier, the average person’s influence is 250 people. If your product is strong, those people will tell people who tell people, who tell people …

During the past year a book called The Shack has rocketed up the best-seller list. It’s already sold over 1 million copies. So the publisher must have spent beaucoup bucks promoting it, right? Uh, no.

The book was self-published. And the author’s entire marketing budget was $300. But he told people, who told people, who told people.

To achieve sales success with your company or product do the following: Make a great product. Tell everyone. Everyone.

Also in this series:

• 10 Marketing Lessons from a 12-year-old Entrepreneur
• What’s Your Passion?
• 5 Tips for Becoming an Expert at Your Craft
• 5 Ways to Stay Motivated
• Get Them in Your Gravity Well
• Grass Roots Marketing
• What is Your Product Worth?
• How to Market Your Product
• Business Card Marketing
• Make It Easy for Customers to Purchase Your Product
• Yellow Page Advertising: Waste? Or Found Wanting?
• Yellow Pages, Revisited
• The Law of Line Extension
• When Line Extension Works
• Invest Your Business Profits Wisely

Tags: grassroots marketing, HeBlogsSheBlogs.com, marketing lessons

We’ve been exploring 12-year-old Daniel Franklin’s 10 Marketing lessons and today we’re going to expand on lesson # 3: Building a customer base by giving away product. While the idea isn’t new, it’s recently hit pop culture in a major way.

Radiohead received a massive amount of media exposure when they offered a limited time, “pay as much (or little) as you want” for their album, In Rainbows.

More recently Suze Orman offered a limited time, free download of her new book, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny. (It’s since hit the bestseller list.) And these are just two examples.

Giving away a free album or book might seem counterintuitive, but it made it extremely easy for a potential paying customer to sample their product. Daniel gave his pens away to teachers for Christmas presents. Do you think those teachers talked about it? Are you kidding?

Marketers like Daniel know giving away free product can lead to powerful, positive word of mouth. Marketers call this a gravity well, or marketing funnel.

The top of the funnel is wide; it’s easy to get into. As you go deeper the funnel narrows, and once you reach a certain point, the product(s) is no longer free. Can you stop once there are costs attached? Of course. But if you like what you’ve seen and sampled so far, you’re much more likely to pull out your credit card than if you’d never entered the Gravity Well in the first place.

Laura and I have a friend, Randy Ingermanson, who developed a brilliant method for developing novels called the Snowflake Method. Thousands of fiction writers have downloaded Randy’s pdf file for free. What does Randy get? Names. Randy teaches fiction writing and markets to those thousands of people who were enticed by his Snowflake Method. Simple? Yes. Strong results? Yes.

Does this mean we’ll be giving away free resources here at He Blogs, She Blogs? Absolutely. Not only through our blogs, but with downloadable content (which will appear soon.) Does this work for any product? Just about. No, car dealers can’t be giving away free cars, but what about free oil changes? Or car washes?

So brainstorm. What can you give away to get people entering your Gravity Well? All ideas welcome.

Also in this series:

• 10 Marketing Lessons from a 12-year-old Entrepreneur
• What’s Your Passion?
• 5 Tips for Becoming an Expert at Your Craft
• 5 Ways to Stay Motivated
• Get Them in Your Gravity Well
• Grass Roots Marketing
• What is Your Product Worth?
• How to Market Your Product
• Business Card Marketing
• Make It Easy for Customers to Purchase Your Product
• Yellow Page Advertising: Waste? Or Found Wanting?
• Yellow Pages, Revisited
• The Law of Line Extension
• When Line Extension Works
• Invest Your Business Profits Wisely

Tags: 10 Marketing Lessons, Gravity Well, HeBlogsSheBlogs.com, Randy Ingermanson

I just finished reading Home to Holly Springs, the latest installment in the best-selling Mitford Series. Jan Karon has a rare gift for creating characters so real, you feel as if you’ve known them your whole life. She’s one of the few authors who can—in the course of one page—elicit both laughter and tears from me.

Her books harken back to the good old days of literature, when conversation was king and relationships ruled. Her characters engage in sparkling, unembellished dialogue that speaks for itself.

In this excerpt, Father Tim advises his two new buddies, T and Ray, what to name the product they’ve just created—a Kudzu-based cream that makes hair grow on bald spots:

T stooped over the chair and pointed to the top of his head. “Feel this,” he said.

He raised his forefinger and felt it.

“Fuzzy.”

“Dern right. Fuzzy as a peach. About a week, an’ we got fuzzy. It’s gon’ work.”

“Good timing. I might have a name for you.” He’d finagled it out of his feeble brain one night at the hotel.

“Shoot,” said T.

“But remember I’m a preacher. I’m not a marketing maven.”

“Yeah,” said Ray, “but bein’ a preacher puts you in sales, an’ that’s good enough for us.”

“Let’s start with packaging, so when I get to the name, you can, you know, imagine the way the name will look to the consumer.”

“Good deal,” said T.

“A white tube.”

“We’re with you,” said T.

“Blue lettering. I read a study that said men like the color blue—has authority.”

“What about women?” said Ray. “We don’t want t’ lose out on that demographic.”

“I didn’t get that far,” he said. “But I’ll keep it in mind. For the lettering, I’d use bold type. Sans serif.” He’d done pew bulletins, he knew this stuff. “Sans serif is more contemporary, though I’m a serif man, myself. Okay. Here’s the name…”

You could hear a pin drop.

“Mo’ Hair.”

“I don’t get it,” said Ray.

“Try again,” said T. “If you don’t mind.”

“Okay. You’ll like this. Hair to Spare.”

“Man! said T. “Hair to Spare. That’s it. I like it. I really like it.”

What did you learn from this snippet?

• In what part of the world do you think the story takes place?
• What do you learn about each of the characters?
• How old are the characters?
• What kind of a relationship do the characters have with one another?

Now, let’s examine Jan Karon’s dialogue-writing technique:

• How often does she include an attribution? (the “said so and so”)
• In what part of the sentence does she include the attribution?
• How often do the characters speak in incomplete sentences?
• How often does the author insert narration? How does the narration move or slow down the dialogue?

Does this dialogue “work” for you? Why or why not?

Tags: dialogue techniques, HeBlogsSheBlogs.com, Home to Holly Springs, Jan Karon

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• Flower & Garden Show makes big move to San Mateo in ‘09
• May gardening classes, tours, and events in Northern California

Rich’s for the Home

• Hot tub maintenance tips
• The role of music in outdoor entertaining

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• Recycling program for compact fluorescent bulbs
• Farmers’ markets on the Olympic Peninsula

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• Did you know that your garden furniture talks?
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Tags: Alderbrook Properties, business blogsNorthwest Flower & Garden Show, HeBlogsSheBlogs.com, Puget Sound Sewing & Craft, Rich's for the Home, San Francisco Flower & Garden Show