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Free Prize Inside follows on the back of  'Purple Cow' and 'Unleashing the Ideavirus'. Seth Godin again does a great job of provoking a review of how we conduct our marketing and challenges us to create remarkable businesses. He introduces two new terms 'a Free Prize' and 'Egdecraft'

A free prize is an idea, an innovation or an add-on to your existing service that makes your product more remarkable. It is ideas that are so simple that they make people talk about your service, and this leads to an ideavirus.

Edgecraft is the craft of finding ideas that are innovative enough to take you to the edge and beyond. It acknowledges that to be noticed you need to be different, and to be different you need to be edgy in your industry.

Here are some quotes:

'If people aren't blown away, they won't talk about it. If they don' talk about it, it doesn't spread fast enough to help you grow.'

'Edgecraft is an iterative process that is much easier for an organization to embrace than brainstorming.

There are hundreds of available edges, things you can add to, subtract from or do to your product or service. Find an edge and go all the way to it. Going partway is time-consuming and expensive-and it doesn't work very well. Going all the way to the edge is the only way to jolt the user into noticing what you've done. If they notice you, they're one step closer to talking about you.

It's all marketing now. The organizations that win will be the ones that realize that all they do is create things worth talking about.'

Book Summary

Free Prize Inside
Seth Godin

Genres          Marketing, Management, Ideas
Pages            235
Readability    3 (1 = Easy, 5 = Hard)
Enjoyment    4 (1 = Never Read, 5 = Remarkable)

You can download "Unleashing the ideavirus' for free here. Or you can check out Free Prize Inside here. Oh and there is a Free Prize in Seth's Book as well. If you enjoy ideas and stretching your thinking, READ IT.

Does advertising really work?

'Old marketing is dead
10 years ago we were able to advertise a position in a paper and know that people looking for a job would see it. Nowadays you need to advertise in many papers and on multiple websites and you are still not guaranteed a good response.

It used to be that you could build a product and market it really well and people would naturally use your service. Nowadays we are all bombarded with advertising and media and information. We as consumers often ignore these messages. When was the last time you made that call after hearing an ad? It is almost impossible to make an impression and a thousand fold more difficult to actually get them to pick-up the phone.

New marketing is everything we do
Brand is no longer about just having a great logo and good advertising. Brand is now driven by everything the company does. Every time we answer the phone or deliver a sales proposal or email a client or they use online, we build our brand. The aim of new marketing is to get talked about, in a positive way of course, because of how ingenious we are!

To have a strong brand you now have to have a service that is so ingenious, so smart and edgy and stunning that it gets talked about.  Think about Google. How many of you started using Google because you saw their ad. None, they didn't advertise. You heard about it, tried it, liked it, kept using it and if you're an early adopter like me, probably told others about it.' - quote from my eBook called 'Being INGENIOUS @ agoge'

All this means that the old way of attracting candidates or getting customers works less and less. It will get harder and harder get peoples attention. Your only chance is to focus on providing a stunning service or being an incredible employer, so that you get talked about.

Finally, fyi, we measure most of our advertsing, we change ads and try new and creative things. When you measure advertising, the results generally dont make good reading, it forces you to think outside the square. You should try it!

Wasting your advertising dollars

A couple of years ago, Amazon.com announced that they were going to stop their advertising all  together. No more magazine adverts or TV. Instead they decided to invest all of their advertising dollars into providing free shipping of books.

From what I have read the marketing industry thought it was a foolish decision and predicted that it would spell the downfall of Amazon. How could they possibly think that investing money earmarked for advertising into making the customer experience more positive would increase sales.

The results: 1 year after the decision total sales were up 37% and international sales were up 81%.

The implication of applying the same thinking to our industry is huge. What areas do we spend money on, that if deployed into making our customers experience more positive, would actually increase sales.

Is it technology or marketing or advertising or capital equipment or research & development. How could we redeploy this money, improve the customer experience and increase our business along the way.

What does a Purple Cow have to do with Marketing?

"Very Good" is not being "Remarkable" is the single biggest thought I will take out of the book 'Purple Cow' by Seth Godin. It has significant implications to my business and will drive me to explore being more remarkable and ingenious in the services we provide as I think we are often Very Good.

'Purple Cow' is about making sure that your business is offering remarkable services.

It talks about traditional advertising basically being less effective and in most cases totally ineffective, and then offers insights into making your business remarkable. It is a thought provoking book and is (by default of marketing generally) targeted more towards product development that service based business. A key quote for me is:

"The opposite of 'Remarkable' is 'Very Good'

Ideas that are remarkable are much more likely to spread than ideas that aren't. Yet so few brave people make remarkable stuff. Why? I think it's because they think that the opposite of 'Remarkable' is 'bad' or 'mediocre' or 'poorly done'. Thus, if they make something very good, they confuse it with being virus worthy.

If you travel on an airline and they get you there safely, you don't tell anyone. That's what's supposed to happen. What makes it remarkable is if it's horrible beyond belief or if the service is so unexpected (they are an hour early or comp my ticket because I'm cute) that you need to share it.

Very good is an everyday occurrence and is hardly worth mentioning.

Are you making or doing very good stuff? How fast can you stop?"

Purple Cow - Page 67

Seth recently had an article in the Guardian which he posted on his blog called "How to be Remarkable". It is a great summary of thoughts from his book and blogs. READ IT!

Book Summary

Purple Cow - Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable ^
Seth Godin - www.sethgodin.com

Genres        Marketing, Business, Product Development
Pages         142
Readability   3 (1 = Easy, 5 = Hard)
Enjoyment    4 (1 = Never Read, 5 = Remarkable)

What Origin Pacific lacked

It has been said 'The best way to make a small fortune in aviation is to start with a huge one'. I am sure that Mike Pero might have personally learnt this lesson after sinking $10 million into Origin Pacific. The full-blown disintegration of Origin Pacific last week, confirmed New Zealand’s domestic aviation market has become fully mature.

No one, other than a huge multi-national, has the resources to compete with Air NZ. They, along with Qantas who choose not to do regional, are the Super Powers [see previous post] in the domestic market and there is simply no room for ‘secondary [ugly] powers’, like Origin.  In the ‘business guerrillas’ camp we have small niche operators like Air2there, Sunair and Sounds Air. Each has very niche markets that Air NZ simply doesn’t care about or is too small to enter.

BIG question - Can you become BIG without directly competing with the Super Powers?

Short answer - No!; but the road of business is littered with companies that tried.

There is a place for specialists with a niche market, but ultimately they have to be prepared to stay as “guerillas”.

If you are not happy being a guerilla, then sooner or later you are going end up in the middle ground. To stay there and grow to be BIG, you will have to take it to the Super Powers. Once you reach the never never land of the Secondary Powers, you now must compete in price, service and features. If you can’t compete in that position for a prolonged period of time and if you can’t continue to grow month on month, you are near stuffed!

Now here’s the challenge if you want to be big, somehow you need to grow and yet maintain the nature of guerilla warfare. Making very strategic decisions about the markets, even specific customers you want, the service you will offer and the prices you will charge. If you can continually move the battle front, the Super Powers will struggle to fully understand what you are up to. They will respond with a defense that is already irrelevant as you have move to the next battle field and target.

In my opinion Origin was doomed to failure before their first flight left the ground. They tried to behave and act like super powers, then align themselves with super powers like Qantas, rather than establishing profitable niche markets and attacking and growing through guerrilla warfare.

Agree, disagree, have a question? - Post a comment now.

The big, the small and the UGLY

The leader must take up a strong position, inspire others to follow him, discover where the enemy is weak and attack there. – The precepts of Ssu Ma Jang Chu – 400BC

In general, the marketplace looks like this;

The Super Powers (Big)
They own the territory, set the rules, and, like the 400kg gorilla, sleep anywhere they want. The big dogs get the biggest pieces of meat. The superpowers are in the production business – they are as concerned with protecting their position on the high ground as they are with gaining new ground.

The Secondary Powers (Ugly)
Their job is to get bigger so that they do not get smaller. They often achieve this by knocking off a lot of small companies rather than attacking the major powers. It’s easier to eliminate the weak than to attach the strong.

These secondary powers are in a vulnerable middle ground. They are facing attacks from both the big buys and the guerrillas. As an industry moves to maturity, the marketing action polarises to the big at one extreme and the small specialists at the other. The never-never land where you never want to be is a medium-sized company in a mature industry.

The Business Guerrillas (Small)
In third place is everyone with a small market share, specialists in a big market. These firms biggest threat is the 800kg gorilla.

What interests me from this quote of “Sun Tzu – Strategies for Marketing” is the never never land. In New Zealand I think it is fair to say that some markets have either fully matured or are very close. This leaves very little room for The Secondary Powers.

Take the shakedown in retail, there are very few medium sized businesses. They are either stores that are a part of one big group, or small boutiques that specialise. Recruitment world wide is a mature market, huge multi-nationals or smaller specialists.  In NZ at present there are a few Secondary Powers, but I am not sure that is a great place to be.

Within transport and logistics, I believe that the Courier Market has neared maturity, Freightways, Express Couriers and the rest. 3PL/warehousing continues to mature and make entry very difficult without being specialists.

Interestingly enough, the Transport industry is only over the last few years starting to show signs of maturing. There are more acquisitions, mergers and off-shore investment. There still remains a significant number of Secondary Powers. The challenge for them in the next few years either become big, or settle for being specialist, staying in the middle ground is never where you want to be!

Agree, disagree, have a question? - Post a comment now.