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Longing to Belong
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On what level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs do you currently reside?
   
Perhaps more importantly, where do you think the majority of your prospective customers reside? Because if you can integrate elements of your marketing plan that appeal to that specific arena of felt needs, you stand an excellent chance of dramatically increasing the size of your customer base.
What needs are they looking to fill? Do they wake up every morning wondering where they’ll find their next meal (physiological)? If so, I’d recommend you go fishing for another market, because individuals concerned with satisfying basic existence needs most likely do not have the luxury of considering the package of products and services your business has to offer.
Jumping to the other side of the spectrum, are your prospects so secure, loved and accomplished that they can afford to spend their time pursuing personal growth and fulfillment (self actualization)? Once again, I would advise against focusing your efforts on a market such as this. There just aren’t enough people out there who have managed to ascend to this level.
So where does that leave them? I’d bet my marketing dollars that the overwhelming majority of your potential customers spend their entire lives right smack dab in the middle of the Pyramid, searching for a sense of love and belonging. Find a way to appeal to that when promoting your business and your revenues will skyrocket.
 Read About Tom Walters
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What Makes a 'Good Day' for You?
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Yesterday I told four strangers to have a good day --a waiter, the convenience store clerk, a client and a friend. We all say this kind of thing on a regular basis, whether we realize it or not. But have you ever stopped to wonder if those you say it to interpret it as you do?
Probably not. It’s just an easy way to be polite and go about your business. But what if you were actually trying to connect with these people and make an impact that had them remembering you the next day …and the day after that?
Let’s look at the “Have a ___ day” expression four times with four different adjectives. See if one hits closer to the mark of what ‘having a good day’, taken literally, means to you.
“Have an interesting day.”
“Have an inspiring day.”
“Have a productive day.”
“Have a fun day.”
Does one speak to you more than the others? That’s because each statement speaks to one of the four temperaments.
It’s a good thing to brush up on if you want to connect with an audience on a deeper level. The challenge is, you’re always talking to at least a couple of each type in any given audience. Be it via a seminar, a newsletter or a website. So you have to make sure certain elements of your message speak in a language that resonates with each of them.
If you want to have a good laugh while learning a little about the four temperaments, listen to Chapter 8 of a fun little audio segment by Richard D. Grant, PhD. In 1993, he received the first ever Innovation in Teaching Award from the International Association for Psychological Type. He’s an expert on the subject and an absolute riot to listen to.
Read About Tom Walters
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Bucking the Herd Mentality
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Dorothea Lasky didn’t follow the herd…
When Wave Books published Lasky’s debut poetry book, Awe, the notion of a cross-country promotional tour was discussed. Faced with the reality that small-press poetry books are ignored by most bookstores, the general consensus was that a book tour was the only way to her poems in readers’ hands. But Lasky had an idea of her own. She would hold readings in various rooms in her home, invite a few friends over to give her an audience to read to and discuss things with, film these sessions and post them on her website, as well as the social networking goliath that is YouTube. When Publishers Weekly asked Lasky whether she thought this kind of ‘virtual tour’ could replace a more traditional brick-and-mortar bookstore tour, this was her reply:
"I’m thinking about how much I love watching videos on YouTube and how that was part of the connection. I think there’s something about the video—it’s a different kind of intima than going to see someone read: you can be really close to the person in a way that you couldn’t if you were sitting there. It’s a different kind of energy but it might be equal if it’s done right.”
The interview continued with a question about how her “tiny tour” choice might affect book sales and whether she thought people would click over to Amazon and buy it after watching the videos. Her response:
“I feel like it would be more likely if I were just watching it to buy a copy, as opposed to buying one at a performance. A lot of times I don’t buy books in those situations—I wait till I can have the impetus to buy it on my own. The way that we’re going, I think it’s likely that an Internet book tour will sell more books, at least for a consumer like me, and I think I’m a typical consumer.”
She may be a typical consumer, but she’s also a small business owner …just like you. And for what it’s worth, I think Dorothea Lasky is going to sell a lot of books. She’s challenging the herd mentality with a new perspective, and she’s using technology to find creative ways to form and deepen relationships with fans and readers.
Are you doing the same for your business?
Read About Tom Walters
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Create a Website or Disappear Into Obscurity. Which Do You Choose?
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Looking for a good book to curl up with this fall? I’ve got just the read. It’s called, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, and you can download a copy for free by clicking here.
What, you’re still here? I figured you’d be knee-deep into the Diversity of Strategies in our Current Information Production System by now. All kidding aside, it’s not the content I want to draw your attention to. It’s the digital exchange of information. If you aspire to wriggle free from “small business obscurity”, you have to find ways to communicate with potential customers and conduct “business” online.
After Yale law professor Yochai Benkler wrote The Wealth of Networks, he decided to do a little experiment to get a feel for how books are going to be transacted going forward. In a matter of weeks between 15,000 – 20,000 copies were downloaded. Some readers even took the time to add to the online version with their own comments and links.
That’s the wonderful thing about the Web. It allows for deeper connections to be formed between a business (in this case an author) and its customers (readers).
A great example of the Internet catapulting a small business owner from obscurity is the story of a lawyer named Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald started his Unclaimed Territory political blog less than two years ago. A credit card issuer and T-Com company called Working Assets stumbled across it, liked what they read and recruited him to write a book titled, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok.” His publisher emailed digital galleys to other connected bloggers and in June of last year it hit #11 on the New York Times nonfiction paperback bestseller list. In an instant, Greenwald’s new career as a professional writer was born. He has since become a contributing writer for Salon magazine and has just released his second book, A Tragic Legacy.
The digital world is here to stay. You can choose to get smart and start promoting your business online, or you can ignore the changes taking place in the marketplace and confine yourself to a life on the Island of Obscurity.
Read About Tom Walters
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Remembering You When it Counts
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Funny., I could’ve sworn I had something I wanted to write about today.
Oh yeah …memory. That’s what it was.
It’s not easy to get thousands of people to remember to think of you first when they have a need for the product or service you offer. Your branding initiative has to work its way through the three levels of memory in the human brain. From shallowest to deepest, those levels are Working Memory, Declarative Memory, and Procedural Memory.
At the end of the day, procedural memory is only reached through relevance and repetition. Which, depending on the type of market your product or service is targeted to, can be a challenge in and of itself.
Puddle markets appeal to a small group and their interest is shallow. Well markets also appeal to a small group, though their interest runs a bit deeper. The limited numbers in these groups make it hard to achieve sufficient repetition. So you have to find creative ways to reach them on your own. Bayou and Ocean type markets offer the most potential, but at the same time, their broad appeal means more competitors will be vying for the customer’s dollar. Which means you need a message with serious impact in order to get peoples’ attention. And once that is accomplished, there’s still no guarantee that message will burn itself into the potential customer’s procedural memory.
Still, creating a meaningful message and having that message repeated over and over again gives you your best shot.
I stumbled upon a company called Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories the other day. Apparently they have a scientific technique for determining what information is stored in the brain. It’s being used to convict criminals, fight terrorism and diagnose disease. They also have an application for identifying what type of advertising information people retain. It’ll be interesting to see if their findings are used to steer future campaigns.
Read About Tom Walters
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I Want, Therefore I Need
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There’s an accountant living in your brain. His name is Intellect. He’s good at presenting objective arguments based on analytical assessments of sequentially-processed information that allows him to reason logically and discuss things rationally.
A few biological miles to the southeast, there’s an artist living in your heart. Her name is Emotion. She likes to counter with subjective contentions driven by synthesized evaluations of intuitively-compiled data that provides her the leniency to decide at random based on how she feels.
These two forces wage a daily battle for the right to control your decisions. And while Intellect might win the occasional round, Emotion is usually the one left standing at the end of the fight. You see, she’s actually the smarter of the two. In fact, she presents such a manipulative and appealing argument that Intellect ends up scrambling for logic to justify Emotion’s decision. Here’s what one of these internal debates sounds like:
“Man, those new Hummers are cool.”
“Your car runs fine and it’s paid off.”
“Yeah, but I’m starting a new job and I would hate to break down and make a bad impression.”
“Hummers are expensive gas-guzzlers.”
“Fortunately, this new job comes with a pay increase. And my commute is only half what it used to be.”
“Okay …but a Hummer? When’s the last time you went four-wheeling?”
“I’ve never had the opportunity! C’mon Intellect, look at it. Is that not one bad-@$$ machine or what?”
“Well, you could write off the gas and mileage when you’re with clients. And it would be more reliable than that old beater you’re driving now. Here, use this credit card. It’s the one with the lowest interest rate.”
“Thanks, Intellect. I knew you’d see it my way.”
You spend a lot of time and resources attempting to connect with potential customers for the purposes of growing your business. Does the language and style used in your seminars, newsletters and websites speak logically to Intellect or persuasively to Emotion? I have eight little words of wisdom if you’re having trouble with this decision: win the heart and the mind will follow.
Read About Tom Walters
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Throw 'Em a Bone
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If you’ve ever tooled around Atlanta (pronounced Hot-lanta), you know Buckhead is the city’s premiere area for dining, shopping and entertainment. The Atlanta Journal Constitution sums it up as a place where “old money lives and new money parties.” The homes are gracious, the malls are elegant, and the restaurants are world-class.
One such establishment is Bones steakhouse. Bones opened in 1979 and quickly became a hot spot for Atlanta’s most comfortable and power-hungry carnivores. It has received the Best of Atlanta Steakhouse Award 16 years running, and was recently recognized by a 2006 Zagat Survey as the highest ranked steakhouse in the U.S. for both its food and service.
The staff arrives two hours before the doors open every evening to prepare for another night of booked reservations. After everything is in place, management gathers the staff to go over a personalized dossier on every customer expected in that evening. Information on those dossiers include where the customers like to sit, their favorite wines, and of course, their preferred cut of steak. Not to mention birthdays, anniversaries and other tidbits picked up over the years.
You see, there aren’t a lot of newcomers at Bones. For the most part, they’ve excelled all these years by catering to the wants and preferences of a restaurant full of recurring patrons. They established a brand with teeth, they attracted a clientele to which the elements of their brand mattered, and they deliver a consistently excellent experience to their tribe night after night after night. That’s what it takes to be the restaurant, or publisher, or author, or widget maker, people think of first and feel the best about.
Ivan Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for branding in 1904. And I’m quite confident Pavlov’s dogs would enjoy a night at Bones—bell or no bell.
Read About Tom Walters
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You, Me & We
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“Somebody shoot me.”
How many times has that thought run through your head as you stood trapped against a corner, unable to escape a conversational egomaniac too entrenched in a story to notice your attempts to climb into the wall and bury yourself in the insulation?
You’ve been there, right? And as you look around you see other conversations going on that you’d love to be a part of. Friends and co-workers laughing and having a good time as you stand there getting pelted by the spittle of a close-talking stranger.
Yeah, it’s a pretty miserable experience. One that’s difficult to extract yourself from in person. But it’s much easier when somebody’s babbling on about himself on a homepage. One click of the “Back” button and your free to go surfing for a discussion that revolves around somebody more important …like you.
That’s what happens when your business’ homepage is litteredwith chest-thumping garble like achievements and product and service offerings.Potential customers grab their boards and catch a wave to a competitor’s site. Leaving you with a site conversion rate that starts with a decimal point instead of a number.
Remember, when people go to a website, they’re looking to satisfy needs. And those needs should be addressed quickly and efficiently within the context of your homepage. They don’t care about you. Not yet, anyway. Their initial concern is all about what you can do for them. Therefore, with few exceptions, the only pronoun that should appear in the copy is Y-O-U. Resist all the “me’s” and “we’s” and put the focus on prospective customers. They came to you for a reason. Anticipate what that reason is and build your copy around it.
Read About Tom Walters
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Have Money, Will Trade for Time
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You awake feeling behind. A lot to get to today. Emails to return, calls to make, clients to meet with …more than any one small business owner can possibly accomplish. Good thing you showered last night. One less thing to cut into the morning.
Considering your breakfast options,
A) nothing
B) a banana inhaled en route
C) a four-dollar muffin from the coffee shop
you postpone your selection (see option A) and dive into the SUV to race towards the office via the quickest route available. A business book-on-tape loops in the background, giving you the sensation of making progress on something even though your thoughts have been hijacked by more pressing matters.
Three hours later you sneak away for a quick bite. And which fine dining establishment is the lucky recipient of your hard-earned dollars? The fast food joint around the corner, of course. Nothing beats a Square Meal ….Deal.
Several more hours whiz by and then it’s time to call it a day. You glance back at your “In” box as you turn off the light. Funny, it actually looks bigger than when you arrived. Oh well, a few things went out today. You may have only given them 80% of you, but hey, who has time to give 100%?
Almost home and percolating with rush hour tension, you notice the gas gauge flirting with “E.” Doesn’t matter that your neighborhood convenience store has the most expensive gas in town. You’ll make that trade for pay-at-the-pump technology.
“Hi honey, I’m home. What’s that? You want to pop last night’s leftovers in the microwave? Sounds good. We can eat while we catch up on our favorite shows. They’re on the TIVO so we don’t have to sit through commercials.”
And then it’s time for bed. A slightly-less-than-optimal day, perhaps, but you’re no further behind than you already were. Oh well, no time to think about that. Must sleep now so you can hit the ground running again tomorrow.
Have you ever stopped to comprehend the sheer number of decisions you make based on speed and convenience?
The Time versus Money tug-of-war is pulling at each and every potential customer out there. And just like you, they’re willing to spend their money to buy a little more time. Which of these savings (time or money) are you speaking to in your attempts to grow your business?
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