Category Archives: Marketing Examples

What do we know about the coming year? I don’t think it’s too much of a prognosticating leap to suggest:

• Technology omnipresence and extraordinary growth globally, which will permeate every part of our marketing, delivery, and follow-up.

• Entrepreneurial gestalt: A merging of one’s personal and professional life as opposed to compartmentalization.

• Major overseas markets provide increasing potential (no matter where you currently reside).

• The ability to instantly communicate all kinds of content—mobile, right-on-time knowledge.

• Major government changes through both free elections and continuations of popular uprisings.

• Increasing “noise” that must be navigated or dampened in order to extract useful information.

• Increasing stimuli and sources all of which demand time investments, often linked to significant normative pressure.

• The departure of Baby Boomer executives and managers and their replacement by people with often significantly different frames of reference.

• Unpredictable financial markets.

Given these likely volatile changes (especially in combinations), what do your clients need to be successful? What must you do to consult, coach, and advise clients to improve their effectiveness in such environments?

First, there will be dramatically differing skills needed. Example: The ability to develop people globally who are rarely meeting in person is far different from developing people who work down the hall or can be easily called in from the field force.

Second, behaviors will have to be shifted to reflect factors such as real time coaching, customers who demand immediate responsiveness, and a greater consideration for cultural and generational diversity than ever before. Example: How does one act with an outraged important customer who is looking you in the eye on Skype?

Third, intellectual firepower that includes an accurate world view, understanding of true trends (as opposed to fads), and the ability to learn rapidly will be required of leaders at all levels. Example: How quickly can one make decisions about competition, customers, and strategy to allocate resources most efficiently?

Fourth, superb communications skills will be a differentiator for those who excel, both within their organizations and with customers. Example: It will be impossible to lead by “proxy” or from behind a closed door.

Fifth, the ability to brand and demonstrate value will be the key marketing advantage as competition and price sensitivity grow. Customer evangelists, as we’ve seen Apple create, will be strong off-balance-sheet assets. Example: The creation of viral marketing results in huge margins and strong growth.

What are you doing to prepare for what’s likely in 2012 as opposed to trying to repeat what might (or might not) have worked in 2011?

© Alan Weiss 2011. All rights reserved.

Here’s a request placed on the web recently, which is all too common:

“I am looking for a speaker to present an hour-long audio conference on: ‘No Pay Raise for You this Year! How to Handle This Conversation with Your Employees.’ Our audience is made up of management and HR professionals across the country. The presentation is delivered virtually, so there’s no need to travel. The speaker will be required to submit a PowerPoint presentation that will be sent to the attendees in advance. While speakers will not be compensated for their participation, these audio conferences can provide them with valuable professional exposure, and we encourage speakers to include contact information in our promotions and in their presentation materials.”

Let me ask you two questions:

1. What successful person would want to share their intellectual property for the gain of a third party in return for dubious “exposure”?

2. What kind of “expert” do you think you’ll attract who is desperately seeking the “E-word” and wants to do this?

The audience is cheated, the quality is low, and the concept is dumb. This is what happens when people want to make money without investing in proper resources and trying to do things “on the cheap.” You get what you pay for, and when you pay nothing you get nothing. Don’t enable this kind of stupidity.

If you’re desperate for “exposure,” leave your windows open.

© Alan Weiss 2011. All rights reserved.

Very few good ideas are ever monetized. They either drown amongst a lot of other, mostly bad, ideas, or they emerge not fully metamorphosed—crystalline, fragile constructions that blow apart in a light breeze.

Here’s how to can turn a good idea into very good money (or at least know that it’s not such a good idea):

• Assess the size of the audience. Do you have sufficient mass so that even 1 percent of the total constitute significant business? The “world” is never your audience. Who really might have pragmatic applicability for your product?

• Assess the quality of your reach. Do you have a highly popular web site, lists of people who know you and trust you (or, better, who have purchased before), a blog, a newsletter, speaking appearance, alliance partners and so on so that your product can be projected?

• Assess the medium. Are you considering a form and format that is ideal for learning and use? Does the medium add or detract from your value? (Example: “Talking heads” on video rarely constitute popular products.)

• Assess your brand. Are you sufficiently well known that many people will purchase merely on the strength of your name and renown? (Too many unknown people think the easy way to money is with a product. Even good products languish when people don’t trust you and/or have never heard of you.)

• Assess your price point. People believe they get what the pay for. Are you maximizing your price based on perceived value? It’s as much work to make a $10,000 sale as a $1,000 sale, so why not make the former?  The key is profit, not numbers of sales.

• Assess whether this is long-term business potential. I believe that any new venture should reach six figures in a maximum of two years. Selling $25,000 the first year probably means much less than that in profit in terms of amortizing development and other costs, and the second year will probably bring even less.

• Assess your ego and motives. Are you doing this because others have done it, or because you want a “book” or a “CD” or just passive income, or are you really providing value to others in varying ways that extends their effectiveness?

• Assess the market. Is this fresh and new, or derivative? Do you really have new intellectual property, or is this the “Seventeen Habits of Teams Pursing Black Swans that Moved Cheese for the Soul”?

© Alan Weiss 2011. All rights reserved.