Marketing, Strategy, Kosher!

Max Motors, a car dealership based in Kansas City, Missouri, put a press release out announcing that everybody who buys a car from them is getting a free handgun.

Now, a handgun costs something like $300  and he’ll actually give you a valid handgun voucher (in essence, a gun shop gift certificate) that you can take to your local gun dealer and get a handgun.

Considering that every car dealer is offering money off or cash back or free window tinting or something, it’s not such a big deal but it’s different.

He did get written up in every major newspaper and he managed to mix in about 14 different hot topics into his promotion, including President Obama and his administration.

He got publicity everywhere by cleverly using the second amendment, the NRA, the political “repercussions” of his offer, and the hook of being of the daring edge and getting people riled up about the offer… that he accomplished his goal… free publicity by the mile, in the value of tens of thousands of dollars, if not more. Some3 outlets covering the story included the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the BBC, and the Times Online…)

And when the publicity slowed down, what was the next step?

Yep. an AK-47 instead of a “mere handgun”. That led to another round of publicity frenzy.

Although, unless you have the permissions to have one, you just might have to settle for free window tinting instead…

Every time two people do business, one of them is taking a risk.  What does it mean?  Think about it this way.

If every day you buy lunch at the same restaurant, and a new restaurant opens up across the street, you now have a problem.  You might be considering trying the new restaurant across the street, but this is the problem.  You already know every time you go to this familiar restaurant, what you’re paying, and what you’re getting.  You feel it’s a worthy exchange.  You gave something, you received something, you made a deal, and you’re happy about what you paid or you wouldn’t have returned again and again.

Now this new restaurant that just opened across the street “calls to you.”  You go in there, pay money, buy lunch–but it doesn’t taste very good.  You just wasted your lunch hour.  The change was not worth the risk so you returned to the place you’ve always gone to, pick up your usual lunch, and go back to work.

But, if the new restaurant is a pizza place that says, “Come try our food.  If you don’t like it after the first bite, we’ll give you your money back.”  What happens?  A lot of people that wouldn’t have tried it say, “The pizza is about the same price.  I think I’ll try it.  What’s the worst that can happen?  I’ll just get my money back, and won’t be any worse for the wear, and I’ll try something new that maybe will be good or better than what I usually eat.”

This is called risk reversal–whenever you do business with somebody, if you can take any risk off them and put it on yourself, many more people will take you up on the offer.

How can you reduce the “risk” that your customer takes when doing business with you- and make them more comfortable doing it?

Enjoy this excerpt from a seminar I gave last night!

In it, we discuss why sometimes businesses can be very successful- and yet at the same time eventually need to fold because no profit is possible…

BTW: Just as with coupons, or using Barter networks, or using Facebook, I always try to delve into each thing in depth so its something I truly understand and can learn from, instead of just having an “overview” of it!

(the video is out of focus.. but the information is good…)

Enjoy!

After reading this story (on wikipedia here, and also see another source here), I felt it had value to share with you… ) As the Torah teaches us, there is something to be learned from everyone… and in this case, I’ll let you decide in the comments what the lessons we can learn from the scoundrel are!

Just as France recovered from World War I, Lustig was reading a newspaper.

An article discussed the problems of maintaining the Eiffel Tower. Even just keeping it painted was expensive, and the tower was becoming somewhat run-down. Lustig saw the possibilities behind this article and hatched a devious plan.

Lustig  invited six scrap metal dealers to a confidential meeting at a prestigious Paris hotel, to discuss a possible business deal.

There, Lustig introduced himself as the deputy director-general of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs. He explained that they had been selected on the basis of their good reputations as honest businessmen, and then dropped his bombshell.

Lustig told the group that the upkeep on the Eiffel Tower was so outrageous that the city could not maintain it any longer, and wanted to sell it for scrap. Due to the certain public outcry, he went on, the matter was to be kept secret until all the details were thought out. Lustig said that he had been given the responsibility to select the dealer to carry out the task.

The idea was not as implausible in 1925 as it would be today. The Eiffel Tower had been built for the 1889 Paris Exposition, and was not intended to be permanent. It was to have been taken down in 1909 and moved somewhere else. It did not fit with the city’s other great monuments like the Gothic cathedrals or the Arc de Triomphe, and at the time, it really was in poor condition.

Lustig took the men to the tower in a rented limousine for an inspection tour. It gave Lustig the opportunity to gauge which of them was the most enthusiastic and gullible. Lustig asked for bids to be submitted the next day, and reminded them that the matter was a state secret.

He selected a scarp dealer named Poisson to be the victim of his scheme. However, Poisson’s wife was suspicious, wondering who this official was, why everything was so secret, and why everything was being done so quickly. To deal with her suspicions, Lustig arranged another meeting, and then “confessed”.

As a government minister, Lustig said, his government wage was not enough to enable him to live well, and needed to find ways to supplement his income.

Poisson understood immediately. He was dealing with a corrupt government official who wanted a bribe. That put Poisson’s mind at rest immediately, since he was familiar with the type and had no problems dealing with such people.

So Lustig not only received the “official”  funds for the purchase of the Eiffel Tower, he also collected a bribe as well (!) .

So, what do you think happened next?

Surprisingly, absolutely nothing. Poisson the scrap metal dealer was too humiliated at having been scammed to even complain to the police. Some time later, Lustig returned to Paris again, and (you guessed it!) selected six more scrap dealers, and tried to sell the Eiffel Tower once more. This time however, the chosen victim went to the police…

Which is why there was no third sale of the tower!

(Source: Wikipedia)

One amazing takeaway from this story is the fact that the deal was sealed by the fact that he asked for additional money as a bribe. Makes you wonder how many times, like when seeing a magic trick, the eye is trained to look at the wrong hand what the handkerchief “disappears”.

Notice: this post may be removed at any time. if it is, don't wonder what happened!

After reading a piece of marketing material that I saw great promise in, I decided to monetize a small mailing list that I have for a long time by creating an offer for them that would bring them “back to life.”

I created a one page sales letter at http://www.creditsupercourse.com and directed the traffic to that link, where I am offering a course on building your business for the (arguably) laughably low sum of just $97.

For the $97 they get a 12 week course, one video per week, about many of the different aspects of growing a business.

Some notes on this course:

• No Money-back Guarantee. Although I usually offer one, I did not in this case.
• Sent out the email on Thursday. although tests show that the best days to email are Tuesday. Because of the holiday of Purim coming up, I decided not to sit on the idea and just send it out and see what happens.
• I received several orders so far… from a “Dead” list.
• The way I will be doing this course is with videos of at least 20 minutes in length each, which will be delivered via email. (I have not yet decided if I will use any recorded seminars to cover some of the material I want to cover.)
• The material I am creating for this course will take me between 3-5 hours to put together and record… and in addition to providing it to the attendees, I will also be selling it as a package in the future.
  Having the videos transcribed, will also give me an information product and content I can use in the future…

This should be fun. I really enjoy trying new marketing strategies and exploring ways of monetizing content over and over… the work gets done once, the information can be used again and again.. repackaged and transformed… the $97 that people pay now is just the incentive to actually get it recorded.

Of course, once the first person subscribed, I have committed myself to producing this… each additional person is just increasing the amount I make per hour of work!

Once the original work is amortized, its pure profit.. the wonder of information products.

Hope you enjoyed this peek into my private projects!

and if you want to get in and buy the course yourself at this low price.. just visit the private sales page that I sent to my list… ==> http://creditsupercourse.com

In New York City in the first half of the 1900s, many an enterprising businessperson had an ice truck and went around selling ice to people.

And then one fine day when the refrigerator became much more common, people
knew this was a great convenient time saver–and started buying them.

From one day to the next, no fault of the quality of his service or his product, Mr. Ice-seller suddenly is out of business. This was a major disruption in his business model.

Now, I don’t know for a fact what these ice sellers did next in that situation, but just for example, here are some ideas of what they could have done:

1) Start selling refrigerators.

They already knew all the people that they
had serviced, and therefore, they knew who needed a refrigerator because the
people that were buying ice until yesterday, obviously, do not have a
refrigerator yet.

2) Sold their customer list or partnered with a guy selling refrigerators. This way, they would get a commission on each refrigerator that’s sold. Or they could have sold the names to two or three different refrigerator sellers and therefore get more money for each lead.

The point is that when you have a list of your customers’ contact information, you can use it.  It’s an asset ready and available for your use, even if the business changes.  Or maybe you end up doing something different than you originally thought which happens in many businesses after the business initial start.

For a much more recent example, when PayPal started, their business was not going to be as a safe and secure connection, a company that transferred money from one person to another.

Initially, they had a little bit of a different business, and after some time, PayPal’s eventual current model developed or evolved.

I can’t stress this enough:  It is essential that you capture your customer’s information because:

1) Anyone that you’ve done business with in the past

2) Or anyone you’ve considered doing business with in the past,

3) Anyone that wasn’t interested in the past­

All these people are valuable contacts that you can use in order to make your business grow.

Stop constantly assuming that you don’t have enough information to start your business.  Many people want to go into a business of one kind or another but they feel they don’t have enough information to do it.

I spoke to a woman recently who wanted to become a party planner.  What was stopping her was that she felt that she doesn’t know enough to become a party planner.  I told her, “Why don’t you do your first event for free, first two of them for friends or whatever it is.  You’ll learn and by the time you get your fourth or fifth event,  you’ll know everything there is to know about being a party planner.”

People have this terrible fear that they don’t know enough and they cannot go into business because they don’t know enough. 

Just bite the bullet and go in; you’ll do okay!

Kenneth Cole is a shoe company that is very popular and famous.  They advertise all over the place.  In New York City, for example, you cannot get on a subway without seeing advertisements for Kenneth Cole.

When Kenneth Cole started, the way that shoe manufacturers got people to buy shoes from you was you would go to the shoe fair in Manhattan.  Every company would take a room in the Hotel, and big buyers would go to the different rooms and pick which shoes they wanted.

However, Kenneth Cole did not have any money to get a room at the Hilton, so he convinced a friend of his to lend him a truck.  He figured he was going to park the truck outside the hotel and sell shoes from the truck.  His friend said, “I’ll gladly lend you the truck, but there is a problem.  You cannot get a permit to park a truck in midtown Manhattan.”

At that point most people would say “The idea is dead in the water, I can’t park a truck there,” and they would give up on that and try to think of something else.  But not Kenneth.

He went down to city hall and said, “Let me ask you a question.  Is there any way whatsoever that you can get a permit to park a truck in midtown Manhattan?”

They said, “There is one way you can get a permit. The only way we will authorize a truck to be parked in midtown is if you’re shooting a movie.”

Kenneth went down to the stationery store and printed stationery that said “Kenneth Cole Productions”.

He then filed with the city that he was going to be making a movie called “The Makings of a Shoe Company” which is the reason he had to park his truck during the shoe festival outside the Hilton Hotel.  He got the permit to park the truck, and in addition to the permit, the City of New York put two fine uniformed policemen at the entrance of the truck, because there was a movie being shot, to keep order.

A man with a video camera, which didn’t always have film in it, was paid to stand outside the truck.  As people passed by on their way into the Shoe Show, they asked, “What’s this all about?”

He said, “We’re shooting a movie.  We’re selling shoes.  Do you want to be in the movie?  Come into the truck.”  He sold like thousands and thousands of pairs of shoes that day, from his truck, outside the event.

To succeed in business, you have to think differently, and never, ever, take no for an answer.  There is always something you can do to make the idea work.  Don’t feel like you’re stuck.

Get other people to do the work you don’t enjoy.  Outsourcing is the practice of productivity, which means that there are people out there that love to do the exact things that you hate to do.

For example, one of the stuff I hate to do is I get someone to transcribe my speeches.  After a presentation, It gets sent to someone on Elance.com (or an Excellent Transcriptionist from Israel that I use- email me if you want her information…); tomorrow I’ll wake up and have it in my email.  I’ll send it to someone else to edit it, and I have a report, book, or whatever it’s going to end up being.  I don’t have to do any of it, just spend a couple of dollars.

For Example… Do you spend a lot of time, 40, 60, even 80 hours making your own website because “it’s cheaper than hiring someone”?

If you hire someone, figure out how much money you can make doing what you do best, and then figure out how much it costs to hire someone to do what they do best, and you’ll realize you’re really losing money by doing it yourself, not making money.