If you are not happy with the way your business is going, you might want to “de-construct” it; take it apart and see where and how you can improve it for the future.
For example, look at the products and/or services you sell to see how they can be improved, priced more competitively, or distributed differently. Get yourself out of the old mold and start thinking out of the proverbial box.

If you’re in a hurry click here: http://www.dealdotcom.com/invite/6957/   
Many new businesses are created by entrepreneurs who take the way something has been done (traditionally) and changed it to extreme success.  Ray Kroc did this with McDonalds, when he stumbled upon two brothers who were doing an extraordinary business selling fifteen cent burgers and oceans of shakes, in inland California.  He took an engineer’s production line approach to cooking and serving  burgers, fries and shakes. Today,it’s the biggest food service company on this planet.
Look at what the founder of Fed-Ex did with his concept of using a ‘hub and spoke’ method of using dozens of smaller planes to get packages to a central hub (Memphis) where they could then be quickly consolidated into shipments for much larger planes, going to other major hubs for re-distribution to the smaller markets.
On the Internet, many digital products are sold by “Internet Marketers” who sell items by constantly mailing out to their ‘list’ of potential customers. They compete with all the other Internet Marketers building their ‘lists’ and selling the same new software, eBook or special service.
Jason Potash has taken this tired business model, deconstructed it, and then put it back together again. His new system sells the same products, but at great discount prices. Additionally, he offers these same Internet marketers a two-tier system of commissions of 35% then 15% to other marketers who are ‘affiliates’ of the first ones. But note this: unlike the tired model of paying an affiliate only once for that specific sale; Jason pays his two levels of affiliate forever...for every single sale that affiliate might make as long as the buyer uses the site. Talk about motivating your sales staff!
He offers only one different ‘deal’ each 24 period; then switches to the next at midnight. This motivates ‘members’ who may need or have interest in such products to go to the site each day to see the latest ‘deal’ and the special price it’s available to for members who have signed up for free.
‘See what he has done here? He’s obtained special ‘discount prices’ from the originators of the products  (they want to sell their wares), he’s placed ‘urgency’ on it by only offering that specific product at that price for 24 hours…or until it’s sold out. Next, he gets those who might need his line of daily deals to actually be the ones who sell it for him, using their own mailing lists; being paid commissions…forever!
 Go ahead. Take your own system apart. See if there is a way you can change things around to offer something to your customers quicker, better, cheaper, with higher quality, or through a broader distribution channel. Once you carefully examine all the elements of your marketing system, you are bound to see ways to make it more profitable. It just takes some time, digging and looking at it differently, out of the box so to speak.
To learn specific details of Jason’s new concept, go to: http://www.dealdotcom.com/invite/6957/    
  ©Copyright, Roy MacNaughton, 2007

It isn’t often I run into what we call in the biz, a “self-liquidating promotion”. By this, we mean that the promotion, activity or ‘showing’ actually pays for itself.
I found one recently when I met Ann and her husband, Tony Fierimonte, and their neat product, the Big Belly. The Big Belly is a unique garbage container that is a solar-powered, automatically-compacting receptacle that looks good, takes up a small footprint, and allows an advertiser to mount appropriate and tasteful ads on all four sides of the container. Ann and Tony have the exclusive rights to sell this invention in all of Florida and the Caribbean and non-exclusively elsewhere.
(see www.solarbins.com/cam) 

This is a terrific example of taking a major problem and turning it into a positive. Imagine how often you have to empty then haul away the trash in certain situations like: at restaurants, supermarkets, hotels, and other food or hospitality businesses, not to mention on busy downtown streets or along the beach? If they fill up fast, they have to be emptied sometimes four times a day.  The 220 gallons of trash is compacted tightly (using up to 1,200 pounds of force) so it only has to be emptied once a day, instead of four. Naturally this saves labor, fuel, truck and time costs.

The garbage trucks (those which are rumored to get the least amount of miles per gallon on diesel fuel, 2.8 mpg) are now less expensive, since they are required for less frequent pickups. Consequently there is less carbon monoxide in the air, resulting in a greener environment. Moreover, since they use free solar power, there is no need to hook them up to the electric grid, dig trenches or string overhead wires to the unit. (However, because they are both attractive and popular, I would strongly suggest chaining them down, so they don’t grow legs overnight).

Classic marketing occurs when someone searches out a pain or a problem and comes up with a solution that solves the problem or alleviates the pain….at a profit. This is exactly what the inventors of the Big Belly have done.

  ©Copyright, Roy MacNaughton, 2007

Yesterday, Internet Marketing Superstar, Rich Schefren of Deerfield Beach, Florida, unexpentantly launched his newest “manifesto” named the The Attention Age Doctrine.
Rich is warning most business owners, entrepreneurs, and particularly online marketers that there is a much greater threat to their longevity lurking in the wings if you are just ready to see it and think incisively about it. It’s not, Schefren says, about lousy email deliverability rates; it’s not about the need for search engine optimization or the obvious shift from written sales letters to video. Nor is it about pay-per-click, or the movement to any other form of online advertising; or I would add: the newest fad of buying traffic on the cheap and re-selling it, or using it to sell your own stuff. It’s none of this.  
It’s about the market for products or services itself: you and me.  It’s about the horrendous amount of “information we are all supposed to try and keep up with in this hyper-charged rat race to the eluding finish line. It’s about just how damned tired and disinterested we have all become, with shorter and shorter attention spans.  We have become a society of multi-tasking do nothings.  We think we’re accomplishing a lot; but Schefren points out with specific examples from several research studies, that the more information we try and acquire, the faster we are dumbing ourselves down. “We are now more skilled in generating information than almost anyone is in managing it.” We are suffering from “information overload.”
In a short ten years, it seems we have devolved to a point where we can’t tell the good, relevant information from the crap.  Schefren poses six basic reasons for this happening:
(1)         Now there is more relevant information than we can even begin to process;
(2)         We are bombarded by unsolicited information, e.g. spam
(3)         The speed of this new information keeps accelerating;
(4)         Then the real value of this information starts to plummet;
(5)         Therefore, the amount of contradictions increase, with conflicted points of view: e.g. what really is true? Who can I really believe? 
(6)         Now, in order to just keep up, our information needs increase exponentially; we are inundated with data.  
Drowning under this information deluge, we are severely conflicted because of doubt. Lee Segal said: “A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never quite sure.” 
The result is too many bad decisions. The tie in between information and action is severed. Now we don’t even have the time to do what we know. We’re too busy keeping up.
So we really don’t ‘get’ that we are starting to think in sound bites, with very short attention-spans and hence a reduced ability to reason, think, or even enjoy life in a quiet space, where we are free and open to epiphanies…if they come.
Unfortunately in this economy and society, rewards come from what we “do” not what we “know”.  We have so many tools and toys that take so much of our valuable time to learn how to use them, we just don’t stop to think about Pareto’s Law: what you know as the 80-20 rule….only 20 percent of the tools accomplish 80 percent of the work; or 80 percent of your problems are usually caused by only 20 percent of your customers, actions, or decisions.
We have been brainwashed in school to learn everything we can…”just in case.”  Perhaps we should think of being much more selective with our precious time, and learn only what we need “just in time” and only if we need it. There is no need to horde information; it no longer brings us more power as in the past, when information scarcity ruled the game.  
Schefren wants entrepreneurs to stop and realize that they are becoming addicted to being in a state of “online compulsive disorder.”  If anyone is going to be more successful in business, s/he is going to have to face this fact of business life…stop constantly doing and start being.
Reduce the number of tools, toys and tasks you are playing with simultaneously. Get organized. Start thinking more and playing less with stuff over which you have no control, which   has no relevant significance to your personal business success.
This new ‘awareness’ of attention-deficits also addresses your own market.  Your market for selling almost anything on or offline today is comprised of people just like you. They too have a very short attention span. They think and talk in sound bites. They do not practice deferred gratification. Their motto is “what’s in it for me?” You are going to have to learn how to penetrate the media and noise clutter, make a meaningful impact, and still be able to get the order.
How to do that depends on your market, your product or service, and your dedication to financial success in the months and years just ahead. Stay tuned for more, next time. 

  ©Copyright, Roy MacNaughton, 2007   
 

Do you really know who your target group is?  By this I mean the number one group of potential customers you are trying to reach, inform and motivate to buy what you sell. There might also be a ‘secondary’ or even a ‘tertiary’ target group, but mostly you should be aiming at one primary group of individuals who have the need, interest, access, desire and money to buy what you sell.

Knowing everything you can about this group is one of your most important tasks. Everything in marketing begins with the word: ‘who’. Once you have the answer to this penultimate question, you have to determine whether or not there are enough of them to justify all your efforts to sell to them. Then you can decide what methods you will use to find and make contact with them; how to use those media to reach and motivate them.  
So why is it that I find newspapers reducing the size of their paper format, and commensurately reducing the size of the type they use for their headlines, columns and articles in the paper?  This is not a rhetorical question.  I really want to know the answer. Fact: newspapers are under attack by the Internet.

Readership has switched in the last ten years, away from younger people. Younger people are watching their news on television and the Internet. The biggest groups of those who still subscribe and regularly read a daily or weekly newspaper are those over 40, maybe even 50. 
What smart number cruncher in the back room decided that if the paper cut back on the size of the editions, by say two inches, they could save huge amounts in paper costs, ink and other expenses?  Sammy Albright, the bean counter, was correct. You can always cut back on expenses by reducing the size of the paper; but what about all the other aspects of what makes the paper attractive to its – wait for it – primary target group?
A friend in Canada informed me last week that the venerable national daily, the prestigious Globe & Mail, published out of Toronto, did exactly that.They chopped the paper in width by between two and three inches it appears, then immediately downsized everything but the masthead.  Now even feature articles on the front page seem to be in  “mice type” and are extremely difficult to read if you are older (like me) and have any problem with your eyes or glasses (like me again). If you have bifocals or trifocals you can just forget it. “’Time to find a new newspaper!” they say.
My point is simple. Before you make any changes, why not find out how those changes might affect your most important customers?  In this example, I am sure that younger readers will find this new change a positive thing. But how many of them are still reading it?  How many are still buying the goods and services from the advertisers that pay the costs to keep the paper going? In the case of a newspaper, making this kind of change without careful research beforehand, can have two bad results: you can easily lose many of your very best customers because they can no longer comfortably read the paper; (2) without those readers, why be an advertiser paying to reach those very same members of that target group? Ooops! 
Your product or service may be different. You may only be shooting yourself in one foot, not both. Regardless, it pays to go back to your original research, your clear definition of who you are trying to reach, educate and motivate to buy from you. Always investigate before you make any substantive changes. Even small changes can upset your customer base. It pays to ask them first, conduct some customer focus group discussions, then surveys. In short: talk to your customers to make sure what you are planning will sit well with them too. Changes should not be undertaken just to make it easier for you or your shareholders.
It’s all about the customer. Marketing doesn’t start with you, it starts with them.
  ©Copyright, Roy MacNaughton, 2007     

Today I learned that “El Al Airlines, the Israeli National Carrier, has deployed ClickTracks JDC, as the web analytics solution of its web marketing campaign which includes search engine optimization, display ads, paid search and web analytics in order to improve the all round online customer experience.”

 Huh? Did you get that? Actually if you’re really into Internet marketing, you will know what they’re talking about. The reason I bring it up is there’s a hidden marketing lesson in here for each of us. Let’s go back, for a moment, to what this new supplier, ClickTracks, is going to be doing for El Al. Danny Gosis, El Al’s E-Commerce Project Manager, had this to say about ClickTracks. “Before ClickTracks was up and running we were flying in the dark. We couldn’t track visitors once they entered (the site) and what they were looking for. Now we can see how users navigate our site and analyze how different navigation schemes and purchasing processes affect the site’s ease of use and ability to simply and quickly complete a flight booking. Now we can position ourselves better on the web and enhance online customer satisfaction.”

 What does this mean in ordinary English?  What it really means is that El Al is now able to track where its business is coming from. The airline can find out the origin of the visitor (additionally, this will tell them which of the many different marketing communications methods they are employing worked best in this particular situation).

In other words, how did they generate traffic to their site? It will also tell them what their visitors are really interested in based on what they do when they enter the site. Where do they go; what clicks do they make to learn what information? El Al can learn how the user moves around the site, and in which order they visit different areas of interest or information. This helps them in adjusting any ‘locations’ and/or access to those locations…something like laying out the floor plan in a retail store. In retail, where do you put the various types of merchandise? Where do you physically locate the highest ‘impulse purchase’ products; or those products that give you the highest profit per unit sold?
 
Let’s say you were in the hotel-resort business: where should you advertise your property to acquire guests? Which media should you choose? Where would you try to get some coverage in the major travel publications? Which ones do your potential guests read most? When your guests arrive, where in the resort property do they go first? What activities do they like the best (would this not be another piece of information that could be shown in the four-color resort brochure as well as on the resort’s web site)?
 
Did you collect the guests’ email address and get permission from them to communicate with them after they return home? (Then you could send them an online guest satisfaction survey to get them to tell you how they REALLY felt about a variety of attributes of the hotel — since they likely would not tell you the real truth, except what they thought you wanted to hear  when they were being interviewed in person on the property). Now you are using technology – to gather extremely valuable information – to allow you to do so many different things that your competitors have not even thought of… yet.
 
‘See where this is going? This new technology allows web masters to design and operate their web sites in such a way to learn how to maximize the benefits of having a web site. Please understand this is not a commercial for this software. It is an illustration of what is being done in the hyper-competitive world of marketing today and how you can use this example to improve your own marketing, off and online.
 
Do you know which ads work best for your business? ‘Where your customers live, drive from, work, play, and buy when they are not buying from you ? Do you know all the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or threats to your business — and your competitors?