Whenever I travel I enjoy looking for new and innovative examples of marketing. To be honest, sometimes I emerge from my cave so rarely (feels like anyways) that the main stream pop culture and the marketing that goes with it is often new (ish) to me.
Which often provides me with interesting observations.
Anyhow, I found myself last night in a mall near Seattle (on my way to Mexco.. oh yeah!), grabbing some food with some friends at the food court. It was about 5:30 Friday evening, and the food court was nearly empty.
We wandered around looking for food, past all kinds of restaurants with nobody in line.
Then out of the blue, there’s this little guy in a big red chef’s hat calling us over and offering us a free sample of Teriyaki chicken on a toothpick. “Only $5.69 for a meal!” he told me.
Now you find me one red-blooded male who’s in the process of looking for food who will turn down a nice juicy chunk of hot Teriyaki chicken that’s being waved in his face, and I’ll show you a race of jungle pygmies that walks around on their hands, using their feet only for basket weaving.
Of course I tasted the chicken, and it was marvellous.
Mustering up supreme amounts of willpower, I pulled myself away from the delicious chicken, forcing myself to make a rational evaluation of ALL my options. I was immediately aware of the power of this form of marketing, and though my marketer’s brain loved it, I still wanted to be sure I was making the best choice!
So we walked around, and around, and strangely, I noticed that the more distance I put between myself and the chicken, the easier it was to contemplate eating something else. All the same, the chicken was now the the gold standard, and everything else was being evaluated against the savoury flavour still lingering in my mouth. And, it was being evaluated against the price – a rather tempting under 6 bucks for a meal. Most of the other meals were 8 to 10 dollars, thus seeming to be in a different class.
Despite my wanderings, in the end the known quantity won out over the wildcards, and I opted to go back for the chicken. Partly because of price, and partly because I already knew I would like it.
I hopped into line, grabbing an extra sample on the way in 
As I sat in line I contemplated their marketing a bit further. Their lineup was 2 rows deep… a total of 25 people in line at the moment I arrived. I had a quick look around. There was a pizza place on the right, with not a soul in line, but tons of pizza sitting there in the warmer. Every now and then someone wandered by and inquired about the price or something.
On the left, there was a Mexican place with about 4 people in line for burritos.
That was the same story all around the food court. In fact, if you added up everyone currently in line, in the entire food court, you’d probably have about 50 leads at any one time. The line I was in had a full 50% of those.
Alright, so I’m sitting there in line. The staff were all hopping… efficient and really giving it all they had. Yelling at each other, chopping stuff, and having a good time – generally looking like they were working hard for the their money. I looked again at the menu… yeah, the chicken looked good. Then I noticed you could substitute noodles for rice, for only 50 cents. Hmm.. I like noodles. Then I noticed just before the till a nice big glossy picture of Teriyaki chicken, and a sign that said “double meat for 99 cents”. Hmm… that sounds good! And then I noticed there were spring rolls as well….
Plus, the meals didn’t come with a drink… so most people in line were buying a drink as well. I skipped that one, but as I looked, nearly every single order (7 out of the 8 that I counted) got the little green toothpick in their carton that indicated double meat. I figure the average order came close to $10, with a drink.
Even though there were 25 people in my line, it moved through pretty quickly, due to the efficiency of their system. I didn’t have to wait to pay, to order, or anything – that was all done well before I ever got to the till. The girl managing the till was taking orders 4-5 people in advance, getting them ordered, prepped and paid before they ever got to the till.
So… What Can We Learn?
A few things stuck out to me from this experience, and I think they’re worth mentioning. First…
The FREE Offer
These guys were out there full time, giving away free food (extremely tasty too) to draw people into their line. They were the only place doing that… in fact most of the other shops looked like you might need to wake up somebody to take your order.
It struck me that all those other shops were seemingly apathetic about their state of affairs. I don’t know if they just never put two and two together, but to me it was obvious. You get someone in with free food, they get that taste in their out, and typically they’re going to want more. Why rock the boat? Go with what you know. Plus, now you feel a slight indebtedness to these guys, as they’ve been so kind as to give you something, asking nothing in return. (Read Predictably Irrational sometime for more on this)
So did they think that THEIR food wasn’t suitable for a toothpick delivery system? I’m sure you could cut up a pizza and do that with toothpicks. I’m not sure how you’d do that with a burrito – though they sell meat too, so why not do the exact same thing? The fast food greasy burger place could offer chicken nuggets or something, or parts of a chicken cutlet. The fish and chips place… chunks of fish. If they really put their mind to it, there would be way. However, nobody did.
I guess this is a good example of ‘moving the free line’ and adapting that into a retail / service environment. Can we do this online? Of course. Offer a free report, or an ebook, or a something.
The LOW initial price & UPSELL
Another thing that stood out to me was the low price of the offer. $5.69. Walking around that food court, it was difficult to find anything else that low. Does that mean these guys were undercutting on price?
Not at all. As I mentioned, I would estimate the average order was much closer to $10 because of the ingenious little upsets. So they definitely weren’t giving up much revenue, even though they came across as the cheapest option out there.
Think we can do this online? You bet. If you’ve got a product, you better have an upsell. The more relevant the better – i.e. double your meat is a terrific upset. What can you do in your market that is similar?
SOCIAL PROOF
There’s something about crowds that draws people – subconsciously I guess we’re social beings, and expect that most of the time, most of the people are right. So… why buck the trend? I hopped in that line despite it being more than 4 times as long as any other lineup in the place, and it remained full the entire time I was in line.
How to take this online? The more comments on your blog, or on your site, or wherever, the more people see that as social proof. Testimonials, success stories… there are lots of ways to create social proof and the feeling of a crowd environment.
BOTTOM LINE
As marketers, it is our DUTY to watch & learn what people IN OTHER INDUSTRIES are doing to get ahead, and then adapt that for our own market.
There were probably 15 businesses in that food court, and only 1 took the initiative to do something interesting to drum up some business. I can pretty well guarantee you this wasn’t the first time they’ve done it either – so all those other businesses have had opportunity to watch & learn. Have they learned? Nope.
I think that will be true for nearly any market. You’ll always have tons of people in a market, but if you can be unique, exciting, innovative, or provide a different twist on something – chances are even if your competition notices, they won’t follow you.
And over time, they’ll be scratching their heads, still wondering why the heck you’re doing so much more business than they are.
Isn’t it a weird world that we live in?
Well it appears that I’ve taken most of the summer off from this blog, but since yesterday was the first day of fall, I guess it’s as good a time as any to get this thing rolling once more.
One of the great thing about owning your own business it the ability to determine your own schedule. One of the really great things about having an internet based business is the ability to work from anywhere. One of the incredibly great things about certain types of internet businesses is the ability to not have to work on them at all for long stretches of time. This is definitely the goal for all my projects; long term sustainability without effort on my part.
I’m happy to say that at this point a substantial portion of my income is in fact mostly automated (not terribly diversified though – but that’s another story).
So, August 1st, my wife and I went on a road trip.
We took a few weeks and headed south to checkout a bunch of the national parks around Utah, Arizona and Colorado. We saw some amazing things: I think Arches National Park was my favorite, though Antelope Canyon and Yellowstone were pretty cool as well. We had a great time and it was great to just forget about work for a few weeks. I was even remarkably good – I had my laptop along (we were using it for GPS navigation) and although I did check emails more or less each day (whenever we had free wifi at a campground) I limited myself to personal mails. I highly recommend doing this if you can – just leave the grind behind. (but NOT the coffee!! =)
When we got home we somehow got into a renovating mood, so we took a week and repainted a huge part of the inside of our house, as well as throwing up some crown molding. After that it was back to work for a few days then we went camping on Vancouver Island for a few days.
All told, I must have taken at least a month off work, and I’m happy to say I still got a paycheck after all that.
Isn’t that the goal of an internet-based business? It is for me.
Anyways, now I’m back at it, thinking about which direction I’m going to take this fall. I’m a little torn between developing new PPC-affiliate campaigns, creating some new products, and pursuing local business clients. At this point there’s a little bit of everything going on, but I know that’s not a very efficient way to approach it.
Anyways, for this blog at least, I’m thinking of broadening the scope a bit more. Recently I purchased a Mac (I’ll review it here in a few weeks hopefully) so I’ve been going through the process of switching over and learning a new way of doing things. What fun ={. In the course of doing that and some other things I’ve been working on, I’ve been running into a lot of problems I’ve needed to solve and haven’t found great answers for online. So I’m thinking if I have time I’ll try to post on some of those things and hopefully help some others get past those things quicker than I did.
Argh – anyone figured out streaming flv through S3 yet? That’s my current one…
Anyways, welcome back to me and you – talk soon!
One of my favorite Wordpress plugins is GoCodes. It is kind of a personalized TinyURL for Wordpress, on your own blog.
Apart from using it to cloak your links in things like blog posts and emails (redirect users through your blog to the affiliate link), you can also use it as a stationary URL that you can change at any date in the future without disrupting your link infrastructure.
For instance, if you were promoting a particular offer for some time, then the offer suddenly went dead, you could easily just replace the target URL with another offer, with very minimal effort. Far better than having to replace all the links in your blog and email campaigns!
Recently it occurred to me that wouldn’t it be great to be able to build some crude split-testing ability into that same concept? This would be perfect for testing CPA offers, as you could send a certain amount of traffic to each offer and find out which converted best.
I know there are URL rotating scripts out there; but I really like working with Wordpress, and any manual scripting really slows things down.
So I hired a programmer to build me the newly created URL Rotator wordpress plugin.
Essentially what this allows you to do is specify a group of URLs you’d like to cycle through, then specify a jump key that allows you to reference this group from anywhere.
For example, I want to create a jump key to cycle through three different search engines.
I create the jump group to include:
http://www.google.com
http://www.yahoo.com
http://www.bing.com
I then create a jump key of ’searchengine’ on my site, so I can send people to the url http://www.jonathanboettcher.com/searchengine and it will automatically cycle through those three sites. Try it – the link is live.
The plugin also has a hit counter that you can reset – crude but effective way of measuring overall traffic. IE if you’re testing three offers and you send 300 clicks, you know that each offer has received 100 clicks.
In addition, we designed the plugin so that it can pass along any URL variables you send to it. So if you’re trying to do keyword tracking, you can do that.
I’ve decided to release this for free, as it is my first Wordpress plugin, however depending on the demand for it I may decide to start charging a small fee for it.
I have never liked reality TV. Although I don’t deny it can be entertaining at times, there are several things about it that bother me. I don’t like the gossip, the backstabbing and the grandstanding antics that drive ratings through the roof. But what bothers me most is not so much what happens on the shows, but what happens to the viewers.
As a coach, I know that the crucial key to creating the life you want is taking action. Watching reality TV is a perfect example of how not to get what you want. Instead of stepping forward and engaging in life themselves, viewers live vicariously through the participants as they struggle to deal with challenging situations. It is easy and seductive to be part of the audience; to criticize and judge others who are taking action while you sit on your butt in the safety of your living room. Meanwhile, watching TV and talking about what happened on the show last night is not moving you any closer to your goals.
Perhaps I am feeling sensitive because of my own age. I will be 57 years old in a few months and recently several acquaintances younger than me have died of natural causes. Suddenly I am feeling a sense of time urgency as never before. Things are going well but I still have more to do and more to give. I have not created the life of my dreams yet.
Think about Michael Jackson. He was only 50 years old and although you may argue that he did not die of “natural causes”, his time is over. One thing you can say for him is that he did not play safe. He took action and shared the best and the worst of himself with the world. He played full-on while millions of armchair critics sat back passing judgment. How many of them accomplished anything worthwhile or even broke a sweat working to reach their potential the way Michael did?
I was recently reading “The Think Big Manifesto” by Michael Port and he reinforces this point with an excerpt from a speech delivered by Teddy Roosevelt in 1920: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Life is short and there is much to be done. Celebrate failure – at least you tried! The biggest and most seductive trap of all is to live your life as part of the audience; to feel smug and superior as you watch, judge and criticize others while doing nothing to achieve your own goals. So the next time you catch yourself playing the role of critic, identify something you want in your life and do something – anything – that will move you towards it. Yes, it is risky to take action. But a greater risk is to do nothing and let life pass you by. And the most annoying and useless thing you can do is spend your time talking and complaining about others while you do nothing to create the life you say you want.
Andrew Barber-Starkey is a Master Certified Coach residing in Vancouver, Canada. His coaching program, the ProCoach Success System, is designed for entrepreneurs, small-business owners, self-employed and commissioned sales people who want to double their income while simultaneously doubling their time off within 3 years.
Jonathan’s note: I met Andrew recently and was very impressed with what he’s doing. I now receive his newsletter, and I found this issue so relevant that I requested permission to post it here. I hope you find it useful.
I used to get a lot of little projects done for me on Scriptlance.com – things like header design and other little graphics projects.
However, recently I thought I’d start using some people from a popular forum I participate in.
Only problem is, most times they require the money up front before they start work. I can see the sense in that, from their perspective. For that matter, I do the same when I’m charging out my services. (well, 50%).
Unfortunately, on about 3 separate projects that I’ve now used that system (paypal, pay up front) I’ve yet to receive a satisfactory result. I get an initial burst of activity and some sort of deliverable, which inevitable requires modification.
Then the modification process starts to drag out; communications become slower and slower with more days in between responses.
Admittedly, part of the problem is on my end as well, as I should be prompt in my communication and stay on their case.
So what’s the lesson to be learned here?
Use some form of escrow whenever you’re dealing with someone online and the deliverable will come at a different time than the payment. Places like Escrow.com work well, I’m told.
The benefit is that the person you’re hiring knows they’re guaranteed their money, if they deliver. You know that you’re guaranteed delivery, or you don’t pay. Win-win.
Recent Comments