Products

Finding Ball Chasers

I have a dog that only wants to chase balls. My wife and I could sit in our backyard 24×7 and not wear her out. As I write this, I’m sitting here with my ball chucker filling the need of my miniature Australian Labradoodle.

The marketing trifecta is when your product is so good, it matches your customers’ needs exactly and they want to consume it over and over again.

Product = tennis ball
Customer = dog
Frequency = hourly

Have you hit the marketing trifecta yet in your business? If not, keep looking and you’ll find them.

How to name and position a product (not!)

In less than 24 hours one of the largest hurricanes ever, “Hurricane Irma,” will make landfall in Florida. It’s scary. Just search for the terms, “Images of Hurricane Irma” and you’ll see what I mean.

Whoever’s in charge of the naming hurricanes should try something more dramatic, like how the military names their operations:

  • Spartan Scorpion
  • Bayonet Lightning
  • Warrior’s Rage
  • Gothic Serpent
  • Montana Mauler

If CNN said, “A mandatory evacuation has been called because Gothic Serpent is approaching and will destroy everything in it’s path,” people would begin to understand the dramatic nature of what is about to hit. Maybe the National Hurricane Center could use this.

 

If you only had an albino raccoon.

Raccoon Photo

Who else do you know that owns an albino raccoon? Think of the exclusivity!  You could charge a small fortune for people to see this amazing mystery of nature. There’s clearly no competition.

Unfortunately there’s nearly no market, unless you’re a dad driving through the desert in the American West with kids under the age of 12 who need to stretch their legs after a long ride.

Marketing isn’t just about creative pictures and words, it begins with a business goal. If your goal is just to make a handful of girls happy each year, an albino raccoon is a perfect product. If you want to build a larger business, you need an army of albino animals, plush toys, and a popular kids cartoon.

Ask yourself, what is your business about, and then you can figure out the price, the place, and the promotion.

For the record, despite the pleas from my daughters, I did not pay to see the raccoon.

How do I keep my regular clients if my product changes?

On a recent road trip through Moab, Utah (a place we’ve been several times before), my 18-year old son was upset with some of the changes—new hotels, new (more) tourists, new restaurants. Some would call it progress. My son called it destruction. Destruction of what the city’s “product” used to be—small, remote, undiscovered.

Their product (the town culture) seems to change every time we go there—probably at a faster pace since the days when it was a dusty trading post in the early 1800’s—even though the population is only about 5,200 people. But in many people’s eyes, it has changed too much.

What about changes that some people think are improvements? Like new restaurants, or the elimination of the uranium mines? If the product stays the same forever, will it be a product people will want to continue to use? It’s a fine line!

If your iPhone never changed, would you ever buy a new one? If your car was still a horse, would your life be as productive? If your favorite vacation spot grew too touristy too fast, would you keep going back?

Certain products need to be updated to keep their clientele and some should stay the same. Remember the New Coke disaster? Before you make a change to your product, think first about your raving fans because they’ll promote you all day long if you make changes that will improve, not take away from their lives.