The Business Master (3rd Edition)

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CHAPTER 8 AGRESSIVE MARKETING - PART II One of the most important opportunities for promotion are the Gift Shows and Home Shows. It's not exactly Mail Order, but you can collect a considerable amount of research data and add to your mailing list as well as sell your product. One of the lines you can usually pick up at trade shows is the specialty advertising item. These come in dozens of different styles, sizes and ideas. What they do is to help you promote your business, and they come in the form of coffee mugs with your name and logo, or key rings, memo pads, baseball caps, ball pens, toothpick holders, business card holders, lapel badges - you name it, someone will sell it to you. I have exhibited in several Gift shows across the country and never once failed to turn a satisfactory profit. These are the shows to which the public is invited, as against the Trade Shows, to which only members of that particular trade are allowed to enter. Trade Shows are an excellent location for discovering new products. I remember a few years ago, someone was exhibiting a foam rubber crocodile on a length of wire. I had an opportunity to contract for an exclusive, nationwide distributorship. I hesitated and decided to take a look at the rest of the show first. When I came back to the manu- facturer I was too late. I still think of it as one of my biggest lost opportunities. Every time I go to a Fair I see dozens of foam crocodiles skittering across the ground at the end of wires. Methods of promoting and advertising your product are limited only by your imagination and the way you look at the Mail Order business. Sam Levin, an entrepreneur who has several good items selling steadily, signed up with a manu- facturer of a pocket sized fire extinguisher. He agreed to handle as many as the manufacturer could produce for a twelve month trial. The manufacturer was in a small way of business with perhaps half a dozen workers. The output of fire extin- guishers was relatively small and Sam arranged to buy on a monthly basis. After he had thought about it for a few days, Sam decided to take a different approach. He advertised for people interested in adding a new item to their mail order business. Within the year, the small fire estinguisher manufacturing business had grown to forty workers, and all Sam was doing was repackaging the fire extinguishers and sending them on to his own customers. Although they were sold by Mail Order, Sam never had to run another advertise- ment. Tom Sullivan was a man I had known since school days. We run across each other occasionally and exchanged hello's. He worked as a lathe operator in a business which employed about fifty people, manufacturing by sub-contract, small parts of a gyroscope for a well known defense contractor. The defense budget was cut drastically and overnight Tom found himself unemployed. For a while he sat at home feeling lost. What started out as a worry and inconvenience and a draw on his savings, gradually grew to be a serious situation. He eventually faced the prospect of losing his home. There seemed to be no answer. Try as he would, there were simply no jobs available. It was then, when he had his back firmly against the wall, that inspiration struck. It was while he was glancing through a fishing maga- zine, and I should mention that his all absorbing passion was Bass fishing, that an advertisement for a new type of fishing reel caught his eye. With his engineering back- ground, he appreciated some of the advanced features of this new reel. It went though his mind that if someone could devise a different kind of fishing reel, why couldn't he devise something else that fishing enthusiasts would buy. It wasn't long before he figured out an entirely dif- ferent type of metal and plastic lure, one that could be easily changed from a glistening, fast moving twister to a dull and limping sick fish. He made a prototype in his basement workshop and tried it out the following weekend. On the banks of the lake he was given the names and addresses of four other fishermen who said they would like to buy one if he ever got round to manufacturing them. His next step was to run a small display advertisement in the fishing magazine that had inspired his thinking. This was before he had even made any for sale. Almost before he had the first lure made and packaged, he had received orders and money for 322 more. Within two years he had taken a lease on the building from which he had been laid- off and had since become vacant, was employing ten workers and his range of Mail Order products had grown to include reel attachments, sling-shot casters, collapsible landing nets, stainless steel telescoping fishing rods, hook remov- ers and camping stools. His marketing didn't stop at just advertising. He went to fishing clubs and demonstrated his product. He didn't sell at the time although he did take orders. His main purpose was to hand out flyers giving information about all of his products. Not only did his mailing list grow by leaps and bounds, it was a very specific mailing list. Tom also attended fishing tournaments and gave his products as part of the prizes offered. He took photographs of the competitors holding their catch and with a cash incentive, persuaded several of the champion anglers to endorse his products. Still not satisfied, he approached the fishing, hunting and sports magazines and purchased their mailing lists. Then he started on the overseas markets. This is Aggressive Marketing. For her birthday last year Tom bought his wife a fur coat. "When I was laid-off," he told me, "my wife thought it was the end of the world. Now she can't understand why I didn't get into Mail Order years ago." Lyall Riggins had taken exclusive distributorship of a bread maker manufactured in Switzerland. He had been con- ducting a modest mail order business for several years and had great expectations of the bread maker. After two mail- ings from his mailing list he had received only one order and was beginning to be concerned. In order to qualify for the exclusive distributorship he had bought two hundred machines and he could visualize them gathering dust in his small warehouse. Almost in desperation, he rented a booth at the State Fair and set up his bread maker demonstration stand. He didn't sell enough to cover the high cost of the booth, or the parking fees, the booth construction costs and the wages of two shift working assistants. Following his usual line of thinking, he had put up a sign offering one of his machines as a prize in a drawing to be held on the last day of the Fair. His objective was to refurbish his mailing list. A week after the Fair had ended, he entered the names and addresses obtained from the drawing into his computer and was surprised to discover that many of the visitors to the Fair were from out of state. Several of them were from European countries. The discovery which pleased him most was that of the several hundred names he had collected, only a few were already on his mailing list. He printed a fresh, illustrated brochure and did a full mailing. The response was overwhelming. He cleared the supplies in his warehouse and placed two further orders in quick succession. There seemed to be a synergistic effect. Sales of other products in his line increased in volume. He tried to find out why the first mailing was so unsuccessful compared with this new mailing. The brochure wasn't all that different, the sales pitch was almost iden- tical. His computer supplied part of the answer. Ninety per- cent of the people who bought his bread maker came from the listing compiled from the Fair drawing. He came to the conclusion that people at the Fair were interested in the bread maker, but not to the extent of going to the trouble of carrying it around the Fairgrounds with them. He also decided that visitors to the Fair were too impatient to stand in front of the booth and listen to his selling pitch. His mailed brochure which they could read at leisure was far more persuasive. He is still selling the bread maker by mail order and it is still one of his best selling items. I mention these three anecdotes to give you further ideas on buying and selling. Success doesn't always come immediately. It takes thought and perseverance to reach your goals. Add a supplement to your original marketing plan. Write your goals down on another piece of paper and put it where you'll see it every day, - on the bathroom mirror, the refrigerator door, beside your computer screen. The paper should state your goals fully. Let it say something like;- In one year I will give up conducting my business from my kitchen table and open an office. In two years I will own a brand new car. It will be red in color, a four door family car and I will pay cash. In four years there will be a swimming pool in my backyard. The swimming pool will be kidney shaped and surrounded by rock gardens. Be very specific. Not just a car, but a red car - or whichever color you prefer. Not just a swimming pool but a kidney shaped swimming pool. The more specific you are about your targets, the more clearly you can see them in your mind's eye, the sooner you will have them. Finally, to close this chapter on aggressive marketing, here are a few suggestions worth adding to your repertoire of marketing techniques. 1. Go to your local Public Library and study the latest magazines slanted towards your potential customers. In particular, study the advertising. Make notes of those whose products are similar to yours. Make notes of those advertisements which would persuade you to buy. Study their style, their headings, their length. Estimate the costs of the advertisements. Next, request back dated copies of those magazines. Ask for copies one, two and three years old for the same month. Look for those particular advertisements. You'll find that the truly successful advertisements change very little over the years. Advertisements or products which have proved unsuccessful will have been dropped from recent issues. Try to determine why some advertisements are success- ful, others less so. 2. If your product lends itself to personal advertis- ing, include a photograph of yourself in your brochures. People tend to trust a firm when the boss has his picture on display for everyone to see. Even the big people resort to this type of personalized advertising. National products which immediately come to mind with company presidents or well known personalities appearing on television are Lee Iacocca with Chrysler Motor Corporation, Wendy Hamburgers, Jenny Craig and Publisher's Clearing House. Local Real estate offices, car dealerships and Fitness Centers also display faces in their brochures or television advertising for you to recognize, (and trust). 3. Put the name of your business or the name of your product, right at the front of your advertising. The American Express Card - Don't go anywhere without it. Post Bran Flakes - Your Natural Choice. Skippy Soup In A Cup - Lunch or Snack, School or Work. Triaminic Makes It Easy - Choose The Right Cough Medi- cine. Post Honey-Comb - Nutritious Corn & Oat Cereal. Yoplait - Yogurt Goodness, Great Yoplait Taste. Right Guard Sport Stick - Anti-Perspirant & Deodorant. 4. Don't chop and change your advertising. Let it run for several weeks before even thinking of changing it. The longer you can leave it, the more effective it becomes. I've seen small display ads in magazines that have run unchanged for ten years or more. Month after month - "You Can Become A Locksmith". "I Can Teach You To Draw". "We're Looking For People Who Love To Write". Quite often, people don't 'see' an ad unless it's been in front of them for some time. When you finally decide that your ad is not pulling as it should, don't change it immediately. Try running another ad with a dif- ferent key in another part of the newspaper to see if your new layout is an improvement. Sometimes switching to a different section of the same newspaper can make a difference. Going from Sports Section to the Entertainment Section places your advertisement before an entirely different section of the community. You may be surprised to discover that as soon as you switch, your advertisement will start pulling like mad. With all this knowledge behind you, there will be times when things don't seem to be moving as fast as you'd like. A sluggish national economy may be slowing trade, making people afraid to spend. Perhaps the season is wrong for certain of your products. Whatever the reason, the following chapter may stimulate your ideas.