“We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is
always ripe to do right.”

Nelson Mandela

If what you know to be true today turns out not to be true tomorrow, when would you want to know about it?

For the world of big brands, this means that many strategies used in marketing and advertising that were effective in the past, are just not as valid anymore.

For the individual and the world of small business, this also means that many traditional business models that worked well in the past, are not the best means for capitalizing on new business opportunity today.

Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” is about abundance marketing and becoming a screaming business success in impossible places. There is a revolution afoot and “Brand You” can be a player – on your own terms – based on your own vision.

The faster you can harness the dynamic of exiting commerce and the emerging new world order - the faster you can get on track with your own business – and lifestyle – agenda. We’ll say it again, speed is the currency of business and success loves speed.

The “My Affiliate Store” business system has just opened it’s doors for sale today. They will only sell 1000 systems and 200 were sold pre launch. The system is being heavily marketed by some of the internets’ top affiliate marketers who have massive email lists. It may already be sold out!

We bought a system pre-launch.
Our new store is called; www.sandboxsports.com

We’ll be open for business in a month and we’ll let you watch how it progresses from here. We’ll reveal what we’re doing in terms of marketing, SEO, market research, content and copy etc.

Check it out! Could this be for you – or your business?
Coach speak: “suit up – your starting!” Well, you can at least get in the game!

We’re not sure what part of the world C. Brand lives in but they were nice enough to send us an email responding to one of our recent posts “Ask And Ye Shall Receive”. We responded to their email and then asked for permission to post it here. They agreed and here it is in full:

I just had a few thoughts about your March/ 13 news article that I was wondering about. First it’s a good article but do you consider it ethical for businesses and marketers to take advantage of a persons problems when you wrote; “Tapping into the level of frustration and difficulty that your customers and prospects are experiencing in a given market is their problem and your opportunity.”? To me, this sounds predatory and cold.

I was also wondering about Dr. Livingston’s market research example and why would he use such an obscure example such as guinea pigs (that has to be such a small niche market), compared to what people really search for on the internet such as business information, travel information, automobile news or even anything like fitness and health related news.

I would also like to read more information about Point Of Difference Benefits vs. Price of Entry Benefits. Can you email me some more information about theses concepts?
Thanks
C. Brand

Our response went something like this:

Good marketers – the best marketers – understand their markets intimately. They collect great data and they understand how to correctly interpret that data. Success comes from knowing that a penetrating insight into your market is prerequisite to an academic understanding about the tactics of marketing. But it’s more than a complex analysis of all available metrics.

Understanding the frustrations and the depth of frustration that your potential customers are experiencing in a given area is imperative. Listen to your customer, understand what their most pressing needs are, create a quality solution to those needs and bundle your solution in an irresistible offer. This is an ethical pursuit of a win/win relationship.

Without an adequate understanding of your customer, your approach is myopic – even blind - because you’re going to your market based on your business’s agenda and not your target customer’s. This approach relies on sales gimmicks, marketing hype, publicity stunts and various tactics that are geared at pushing product – and not necessarily solving problems.

Marketing a product without really knowing if it solves your customer’s problems can turn out to be a costly mistake for your business. Even if you know that you have a great product, your customer just may not want to buy – or worse, they buy and return for a refund. A great marketing strategy will always prevail over great marketing tactics and the best strategies begin with an intimate understanding of your target market.

So what about the guinea pig example?
Best to read our post: The Story of The Guinea Piggy Bank!

Concerning “Point Of Difference Benefits vs. Price of Entry Benefits,” the best thing to do is to learn about these concepts direct from the man who has provided approximately FOURTEEN MILLION DOLLARS in consulting services to a who’s who list of Fortune 500 companies that include:

A T & T, American Express, Astra Zeneca, Bausch & Lomb, Burger King, Chase, Citibank, Colgate-Palmolive, Grey Advtg, Hallmark, Hunt Wesson, J & J, JJill, Exxon, Flagship Banks, Ford Motor Company, General Mills, Gore, J Walter Thompson, Kodak, Kraft, Lipton, M & M/Mars, Master Card, Merck, Nextel, Novartis/Ciba, Ortho McNeil P & G, Pfizer, Pharmacia, Pillsbury, Roche, Sara Lee Unilever, Warner Lambert,

Just visit Real Marketing Muscle to get informed. It’s free to opt in and the information could be priceless to your business enterprise. Good Luck!

This is the true story by marketing psychologist, Dr. Glenn Livingston, about making money starting out with an information product on Guinea Pigs.

How I Fired All My Corporate Clients And Went From $ZERO To $28,462 per-month in PASSIVE INCOME - Starting With a $9.99 E-Book On Guinea Pigs!

Here’s the story!

The decision to move out of the corporate consulting sector was a radical career change for me. I fired all of my Fortune 500 clients with the intention of creating new businesses that would provide totally passive income … with no headaches, no client “emergencies”, no ridiculous work hours and no time away from my family.

But There Was One Major Problem!

I had a relatively crazy idea to re-engineer my market research methods (systems for which I’d already been paid millions by clients in the corporate sector) - to work in any area of business, including both established small businesses, and simple niche marketing on the internet. I had targeted the online media as a kind of latecomer to the e-book craze, … but I knew almost nothing about Internet marketing.

Now honestly, I was pretty scared, and I wasn’t sure if it was doable. After all, there’s a big difference in the advertising & distribution methods available to companies like American Express, Whirlpool, Nextel, Lipton and G.E., and those available to ‘the little guy’, - but I had to make this workable for EVERY business.

Well, what happened next was - quite frankly - stunning.

Here’s how it all went down. Much to my parent’s dismay (they had been SO happy to tell all their friends about “my son the doctor”), the first product that I selected for my new “online empire” was a $10 e-book about guinea pigs. No kidding! Don’t ask why – it’s a long story that goes back to my childhood. But it’s also the perfect example of just how powerful this system is.

You see, using just my research system and nothing else - no purchased opt-in lists, no backend products, no SEO, no affiliates and no JV deals - simply buying my own traffic, I was able to start banking $2,000 a month with my guinea pig book.

I quickly tested and duplicated this success in other markets, and within six months after launching my ‘piggy project’ – I had worked up to $6,300 a month in passive income.

It Gets Better

I went back and made some tweaks to this system, and was able to DOUBLE my business in approximately 6 months.

Six months later I DOUBLED IT AGAIN.

And what’s really interesting is that during this time, my web sites attracted a boatload of competitors – yet my numbers kept going up and up (I discovered that when you fully apply the system and make sure you’re really delivering what the market wants, you can make MORE money when you have more competition!)

And … something even more interesting … I’ve used this virtually fool-proof formula to launch site after site after site. Now to be honest, some of these sites are more successful than others. But to date, I’ve not lost ANY money when I followed the formula in full.

Not bad for a crazy idea, huh?

Well, that’s the story of how I first applied my system outside the ‘big brand’ world, and how I started refining it to get it to do what it does today. (I’ve become kind of obsessed with making it better every month!)

From script to screen, Connecticut based XVIVO is an award-winning animation studio that creates spectacular, custom visual productions for advertising agencies, broadcast companies, educational institutions and a variety of science, medical and technology companies.

Harvard University selected XVIVO to create an original animation that would illuminate the mechanisms that allow a white blood cell to sense its surroundings and respond to an external stimulus. The objective for the project was to introduce a medium that could take undergrad students beyond the more limited perspective of their textbooks.

The end result was a masterful feature that explores and illustrates the different cellular environments and the inherent communications within this micro universe. “The Inner Life of the Cell” is a hypnotic, three-dimensional journey through the microscopic world of a cell. It’s an eight and half minute feature that took 14 months to produce.

Since it’s release, “The Inner Life of the Cell” has been well received – to say the least. This is an excerpt from a recent Wired News interview with David Bolinsky of XVIVO:

Wired News: What was the reaction to it there?

Bolinsky: We started receiving tens of thousands of e-mails and phone calls, the hits on our website went from 200 a week to 650,000 a week and it was picked up by ABC News. We were getting e-mails from major universities all over the world asking if they could use this for their students (and) calls from high school teachers wanting it for advanced biology classes … and museums that want us to work on museum exhibits because they want to modernize how they teach science.
This is what I hoped when I started this company — that it could change how people saw things. We (thought) this great academic animation would be shown at Harvard and would disappear forever under the Ivy dome of silence - We didn’t really anticipate that it would go anywhere and when it did it took us all by surprise.

The complete Bolinsky interview is at Wired.com -
“The Inner Life of the Cell”

While this video excerpt is set to music - the full eight and a half minute version includes narration that explains the dynamic processes that you’re watching.

So what does this have to do with marketing news? Well there’s the viral concept in play here – good creative takes on a life of its own. The publicity has surprised even Bolinsky who expected that his creative feature “would disappear forever under the Ivy dome of silence”. But the story has legs.

The following advert is the creation of Brazilian ad agency; Dez Brasil for the Asics athletic brand. The ad copy featured with the print ad reads:

Left is rational. Right is emotional. Left, right, left, right, left, right is balance.
Running is in our DNA.
Asics. Sound mind, sound body.

We wonder if the creative elements behind the print advertisement were in any way inspired by “The Inner Life of the Cell”. Strong symmetry between the two projects! Both thought provoking and both well done. Click the image for a good look!

The observant among you will notice the muscle of the “sound minded” Asics runner. The progressive marketers among you who want to thrive in your own business universe realize that you need your own Real Marketing Muscle.

Luck is not chance – It’s toil – Fortunes’ expensive smile is earned.

– Emily Dickinson

What to earn fortune’s expensive smile? Smart marketers are using Real Marketing Muscle to unfair advantage !

Tapping into the level of frustration and difficulty that your customers and prospects are experiencing in a given market is their problem and your opportunity. They have a thorn in their paw and your business proposition is just the solution that will effectively relieve their angst.

When you can discover issues that are your target audiences’ most pressing problems – issues that are not being satisfied anywhere else - you can position your business offering as the go to solution. Your customers will shout “Hey, they’ve got exactly what I’ve been looking for - and I couldn’t find it anywhere else!”

The best approach to unearthing pressing customer concerns is to survey them. And to discover the potential nuggets of gold from within your survey data, you’ll want to focus on the distinction between Point Of Difference Benefits vs. Price of Entry Benefits.

“Most people that take the time to survey their market really haven’t a clue how to use the information they gather and in fact, they allow their surveys to throw them way off the mark.” So says marketing research expert, Dr. Glenn Livingston.

Dr. Livingston is a certified psychologist who earns a nice living as a quantitative marketing research expert. He has completed highly successful studies for an impressive list of corporate brand names such as Bausch & Lomb, Whirlpool, and Nabisco. His cutting edge information is now available to small business marketers as well.

Too often, the data results of a survey can mislead a marketer because they interpret the frequency of a given response to be essentially the same thing as the importance of response. But these concepts are not created equally.

“For example” says Dr. Livingston, “if you do a survey of guinea pig searchers online, you’ll find people very frequently ask about how long a guinea pig lives. In fact, this will probably be the most common question you’ll get.

Now if you go out and design a product all about how long guinea pigs live, you’re gonna be out of luck pretty quickly because what you’ve discovered is not a purchase motivating benefit – it’s a ‘price of entry’ benefit.”

A price of entry benefit is a benefit that all products in a given market must have in order to even be considered by a purchaser. A point of difference benefit is something that “consumers perceive as hard to find answers to their pressing problems - these are where the real market gaps are - where you’ll find the best opportunities to shine” according to Livingston.

Continuing with the guinea pig market example, a more important question for someone marketing a book on guinea pigs might be how to determine the gender of a guinea pig before its two weeks old.

This information may not be seen as often in your survey responses, but its marked as a lot harder to find. The objective is to put enough of these tidbits together and you wind up being THE source to solve your clients’ most difficult problems. Solutions that they can’t find anywhere else.

And getting some Real Marketing Muscle might just be the solution to your own businesses’ most pressing problems. Solutions that your competitors don’t know about yet!

Stand Upright, speak thy thoughts,
declare the truth thou hast,
that all may share; Be bold,
proclaim it everywhere:
They only live who dare.

Lewis Morris

And those who dare have real marketing muscle!

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC’s) has recently released its’ tenth annual Global CEO Survey. The findings reveal that the majority of the 1,100 CEOs surveyed are bullish about the prospects for revenue growth concerning their respective companies.

The CEOs represent businesses from 50 different countries with more than 90 percent of them expressing an expectation of business expansion that will be fuelled by improved market penetration, increased geographic expansion and more merger and acquisition activity - often across borders.

Among concerns, 73 percent of the respondents’ site over-regulation as the primary threat to conducting business followed closely with 72 percent seeing a lack of skilled labour as a challenge. 66 percent see low-cost competition as a threat to earnings.

65 percent see active engagement in social issues as a key factor in the recruitment and retention of employees. Surprisingly, 59 percent of respondents fail to see a threat of global warming or climate change as a major concern for business prospects.

Roughly 75 percent of these world CEOs agree that continued and sustainable globalization is beneficial for both developed and emerging markets. To download the report, go to 10th Annual Global CEO Survey.

Well, we don’t really know if Mr. Rogers ever spent time in the hood with Zig Ziglar or Tom Hopkins back in the day but the man could close. Now some folks might take exception to any connotation that Mr. Rogers was some kinda snake-oil salesman.

That’s not what we said – pay attention! This has more to do with the copy writing principle expressed in our last two Copy That posts. Hope you haven’t forgotten the foundation to a great marketing message already – but just in case, here it is again:

“A great offer with poor copy will always perform better than a poor offer with great copy.”

The following video clip is an excellent demonstration of the Reverend Fred Rogers delivering an irresistible offer with sublime eloquence and intelligence. We’re pretty certain that his address was not a methodical, structured sales presentation designed to lead his prospect to an automatic close but nonetheless, his presentation was persuasive and successful.

We think that Mr. Rogers was just keeping it real - delivering a sincere, principle centered message without any tactics or strategy in mind at all. He is effective because his value proposition is in essence, a great offer - “a neighbourhood expression of care everyday to each child”.

To quote Zig Ziglar from his Secrets of Closing the Sale: “You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

Frederick McFeely Rogers was the host of Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood which was in production for roughly 33 years. He was an iconic presence to millions of television viewers and was known as a tireless advocate for the education and welfare of children.

This is worth watching – even has a Hollywood ending!

See - if you viewed the Mr. Rogers parity video in our Who’s Calling post, we promised that we would be bringing you some excellent Mr. Rogers footage.

One can only imagine what Mr. Rogers could have done if he had known about Real Marketing Muscle! Stay tuned – Caffeine Marketing wants to help you get buff!

This is a follow up to our last post “Who’s Calling?” Telemarketing sales rules can impact the way businesses market by phone. Even if you’re a consumer, you can bookmark - or link to - this page as a resource for accurate information on “Do Not Call” regulations in the United States.
Most of the States covered below are a direct link to an official site that provides information about that particular States policy and position on telemarketing in the US. Certain States have aligned their regulations with the Federal Do Not Call Registry. Just click on the State that you’re interested in researching and get informed.
A
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas
C
California, Colorado, Connecticut
F
Florida
G
Georgia
I
Idaho, Illinois, Indiana
K
Kansas, Kentucky
L
Louisiana
M
Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana
N
Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina,
North Dakota
O
Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon
P
Pennsylvania
S
South Dakota
T
Tennessee, Texas
U
Utah
V
Vermont
W
Wisconsin, Wyoming

“Creativity is a drug I cannot live without”.

Cecil B. DeMille

More and more, women throughout the world are becoming increasingly successful and influential in the world of small business. Not only are more women succeeding, the total number of would be female titans is also growing.

In Canada for instance, a major Canadian Bank has recently released a market research report that reveals some interesting metrics about that country’s emerging female entrepreneurial dynamic. Fittingly, the study is entitled “Women Entrepreneurs: Leading the Charge”.

According to the market survey, there are approximately 800,000 female business owners in Canada or roughly 2.5% of the country’s population. The total populace of Canada is slightly less then that of California at roughly 32,000,000 people.

The report predicts that there will be one million women who own a small business by the year 2010. An increase of 25 % over the next three years. The female business start-up rate is growing 60 per cent faster than their male counterparts.

60 per cent of the presently self-employed women are what the research report describes as “lifestylers”. Those who are business owners and who have chosen self-employment specifically as a means to balance the demands of work combined with family life.

Interestingly, 70 per cent of female business owners are married. And about 33% have children that are under the age of 12. The average age of women entrepreneurs is 41.

The fastest-growing group among the self-employed are women over age 55 with a growth rate of roughly 4% per year. This growth rate is double that of self-employed men in the same age group.

The study does not reveal however, if this global master plan for female world domination was incubated in Canada or not.

Concerning all acts of initiative and creation,
there is one elementary truth the ignorance
of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:
that the moment one definitely commits oneself,
then providence moves too. All sorts of things
occur to help one that would never otherwise
have occurred. A whole stream of events issues
from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner
of unforeseen incidents, meetings, and material
assistance which mo man could have dreamed
would have come his way.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

So have you watched that nice little spoof that we posted that is a parity of Windows vs. Apple?

Consistent with some of our recent posts about truth being a prerequisite foundation for satire, here are a few interesting spots that support the Gates vs. Jobs parity.

First, this is Steve Jobs on the originality and creativity that fuels the success of Microsoft – Not!

Next is a nice little spot featuring Steve Ballmer representing Microsofts’ take on the Apple iPhone and its’ entry into the marketplace. From a marketing point of view, it’s about positioning. As you consider Ballmers’ remarks, be mindful of the underlying marketing strategy that really speaks to Microsofts’ success – strategy not product per se.

Finally, this last spot is from iMedia Group. Nice little juxtaposition that fits in with this whole Microsoft vs. Apple theme. Do you think that this message is the least bit manipulative? So what’s the intent of the videos’ creators? (You may have to click on this video a couple of times which will take you to the iMedia profile at youtube)