Posted by:
Daniel Levis
October 24, 2007
Issue #263
In this issue:
- How beer companies lie to men and get away with it …
- Basic instinct selling at its worst and best …
- Why admen (and women) get paid to think about sex while they work …
- How to harness the power of fantasy in your promotions to skyrocket your sales …
- And more!
Men listen … despite what the beer commercials imply, beer will NOT get you buxom, bikini-clad babes. It won’t …
Drink enough of the stuff, and they look like babes. Drink still more and you can grow your own breasts. But in truth … a beer-bloated dude is about as welcome in a bevy of bodacious bombshells as a skunk at a lawn party. Isn’t that right girls? So much for truth in advertising …
But it is true: appealing to people’s basic instincts and emotions is a powerful way to get their attention and captivate their imagination. It may in fact be all you need to do if your prime directive is to get them to remember your brand as they’re walking the aisles trying to decide on what kind of beer, toilet paper, or toothpaste they ought to buy. If you want to imprint the name of your product on somebody’s mind, the keys are emotion, a catchy buzz phrase, and plenty of repetition.
The idea is to get people to associate your product with a particular “feeling” they enjoy. In the case of the beer commercials, it’s a party atmosphere, and the promise of sex.
In the case of a sports car, it might be a feeling of virility and success. For fine women’s clothing and jewelery, it might be a feeling of femininity and desirability. Isn’t there something inherently sexual in the experience of these types of goods: The heady mix of smoking tires and half burned hydrocarbons, or the luminescent shimmer of a strand of pearls on a woman’s neckline?
Not only do these objects of desire help us to feel a certain way, even more importantly, they allow us to express our attractiveness to the opposite sex, like a peacock’s extravagant plumage of iridescent tail feathers.
Why admen (and women) get paid
to think about sex while they work …
In fact, almost everything we buy is at some level connected to our innate need for sexual expression. In each case the products themselves are either symbols that allow us to flaunt our suitability as a mate, or a means toward the acquisition of other products that fulfill this primal, unconscious need.
Think about this:
What drives a man to invest in his career, and excel in the business world? He wants to impress some woman, of course!
Since he is instinctually driven to get as many of his genes floating around in the gene pool as possible, he earns money to buy symbols that prove he is good procreation material. It is a man with a plan – not a man with a beer – who gets the chicks.
Mucho moolah allows him to afford more potent symbols than the next guy, evidence of his higher social status. And the higher his social status appears, the greater his access to the opposite sex.
Social status is of course relative. If some challenger on the block upgrades to a new Hummer he needs one too. The poor man has to keep upping himself to keep up with the Joneses – proving he is indeed the one with the authentic plumage – or risk spending his nights alone.
Of course tying your product to the expression of this basic instinct can be very profitable indeed. But it is a tricky business …
(more…)
Posted by:
Troy White
October 23, 2007
Issue #262
In this issue:
-
Time-tested secrets of getting the right buyers in the right mood.
-
Sample marketing calendars that you can use immediately to improve your testing and returns.
-
9 Steps to ensure you leverage your past successes, and move quickly past the steps that didn’t work.
- And Much More!
Fellow business builder,
How can something so simple seem so difficult?
A marketing plan does NOT have to be difficult – nor does it have to take you long.
So why is it that this crucial tool is so neglected by fellow entrepreneurs and small business owners?
Time? Yes – it takes a little bit of that.
Money? No – it costs you nothing to write out the plan.
Outside Resources? No – you can do this on you own – and using the following guideline, you can do this is just a few hours.
So, really, there are no good reasons why you shouldn’t invest the time to do this.
It IS in your best interest to have one.
Why?
Because it is much more costly, and time intensive, to experiment along the way. A well thought out plan will help you put the team in place to manage all the to-do items.
There are many books on the subject, but I want to give you an easy, step-by-step formula that can help you get this done.
With the biggest shopping season
of the year now creeping up on us,
this couldn’t be more timely.
Before we begin, I am assuming that you already have a product or service offering in place, that you know what makes your product or service unique (your USP), and you know that people want to buy what you are offering. USP creation has been covered in other articles in The Total Package – so we won’t go through that again.
Once you have your USP in place, what you then need to understand is the profile of your ideal client.
The last thing you can honestly expect
to get away with here
is “everyone is my ideal client”.
It is NEVER “everyone”.
You must put a list together showing you do understand them: with their age, name, sex, income, hobbies, interests, challenges, education, employment status, etc.
If you don’t know these, you don’t know your customers.
Once you have a list of who they are
and what they want …
then you need
to write down what YOU want of THEM.
Do you want your customers to buy every month of the year?
Do you want them to double the average purchase price?
(more…)
Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
October 22, 2007
Issue #261
- The 5 things that matter most to me in my personal life and how they apply to my business and yours …
- My greatest success and biggest mistake – and what you can learn from them to skyrocket your direct marketing career …
- How I convince my clients to pay me royalties – you do this and your income will shoot through the roof …
- And much, Much MORE!
Dear Business Builder:
Drayton Bird founded the UK’s first major direct response marketing agency.
David Ogilvy loved Mr. Bird’s direct response campaigns and sales copy so much, he bought Drayton’s agency and promptly installed him as Chairman of the Board of Ogilvy Mather Direct.
Drayton and his team at Ogilvy created brilliant direct response promotions for American Express, Bank of America, Ford, Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, Philips Electronics, Unilever, Visa credit cards and many other multi-billion-dollar international household-name companies.
(more…)
Posted by:
David Dittman
October 20, 2007
Issue #260
Hello and welcome back to another installment of Working IT Out! Today I’d like to take some time and discuss one of the most important issues you’ll come across during your e-mail marketing.
Now, we’ve all been there before … I just finished writing a killer sales letter.
The copy is sparkling with tasty quips and glorious phrases that outline and emphasize the unbelievable deal that I’m orchestrating. You would be a fool not to buy after perusing my persuading work of art.
But alas, many will never see my masterpiece because the powers that be have declared that my magnum opus of sales letters is flagged as spam.
AAARGH!
So what we need to do as copywriters, marketers, and business owners is ensure that our message actually gets to the potential customers just chomping at the bit to receive our message.
In this issue we’ll talk about:
- The difference between opt-in e-mail, double opt-in e-mail and opt-out e-mail.
- What whitelisting is and how to use it.
- What some of the experts are saying about e-mail deliverability.
- Several different resources to test your e-mails through, to give you the best chance at eluding spam blockers.
- And much, much more!
(more…)
Posted by:
Julie McManus
October 19, 2007
Issue #259
11 Easy Stress Reduction
Techniques You Can Implement
in Just 5 Minutes or Less,
Guaranteed!
Dear Business Builder,
TGIF! At the end of an extra busy week, Friday shows up to make it all better. I’m visualizing sleeping in late … breakfast in bed … and lounging around reading the newspaper from cover to cover … hours of sweet relaxation.
Who am I kidding? It’ll never happen; my three year old will make sure of it. Chances are better she’ll have a long list of Mommy do’s and the commands will start as soon as her cute, sleepy, little head leaves the pillow early Saturday morning.
She and her eight year old sister will keep me hopping most of the day and we’ll play in between loads of laundry, endless housework and trips to the market on Saturday and more laundry, yard work and trips to Home Depot on Sunday. It’s virtual non-stop activity the whole weekend. Such is life in the McManus household and most every other household with kids and two working parents, I suspect.
They’ll wrestle with bedtime (but Mom I don’t have school tomorrow) … procrastinate about getting in the bathtub (but Dad I took a bath yesterday) … and stage a hunger strike at dinnertime (I don’t like meatloaf, I want McDonalds) … these two are harder to please than my toughest clients.
And don’t even get me started about the world’s two most annoying cats! Anyone have a burlap sack and some heavy bricks I can borrow?
Note to enraged cat lovers: No nasty comments please, I’m kidding!
All that and running a business can only add up to one thing … STRESS!
Oh Please, Just Give Me
5 Minutes of Peace!
And in a miracle of US Postal Service efficiency, my 5 minutes of salvation arrived in a 6” x 9” brown bubble envelope. But before I explain, let me back up a bit and set the stage.
I was having a couple of really stressful weeks. I’d put my youngest daughter in a highly regarded new Montessori preschool and it had taken a few weeks to get her settled in. My workload was rapidly increasing and I was in between two back-to-back conferences and had only a couple days to get my work caught up in between when the phone calls started …
My daughter had kicked the teacher and I needed to come pick her up. Then, the next day I got another phone call … only this time she had bit the teacher and I had to pick her up immediately. Plus, they wanted to have a parent/teacher conference to discuss her behavior at school. Who can blame them?!
Now, I’m sure you’re all laughing by now thinking you had a few teachers in school that you would have liked to bite … but at the time I was completely stressed out. What had happened that took my usually happy-go-lucky kid and turned her into a little hellion with an ax to grind with her new teacher all in the matter of a few weeks?!
Oh man, I didn’t have time for this! Plus always quick to overreact, I started having visions of men in white coats and hours of therapy sessions when my husband so plainly stated, “I bet she’s bored.” And just like that a light bulb went off in my head. It made perfect sense and her new teacher agreed.
And so it was, her new Montessori school was such a drastic difference from her previous school and there just wasn’t enough activity to keep her busy and engaged. The change in curriculum left her too much time to get in trouble. So it turned out Montessori just wasn’t for her.
(more…)
