Welcome to the world’s first SMALL BIZ Alphabet Series of blog posts!

Welcome to the world’s first SMALL BIZ Alphabet Series of blog posts!

Welcome to the world’s first SMALL BIZ Alphabet Series of blog posts!

Welcome to the world’s first SMALL BIZ Alphabet Series of blog posts!

Welcome to the world’s first

BIZ ALPHABET SERIES of blog posts

“C”…

CUSTOMERS/CONSUMERS

CUSTOMERS and CONSUMERS. These are sometimes, but not always, one in the same.

You buy a can of beans; you cook and eat the beans; you are both the customer and the consumer. But, If I am 6-years-old and badger you to buy me Chocolate Tsunami Cookies because “They Make Waves When Dunked in Milk,” and you buy them and I eat them – then you are the customer and I am the consumer.

In that situation, we are very different people indeed, but the bottom line to the Chocolate Tsunami Cookie Company marketing people is that I, the consumer, have influenced your customer purchase.

The monster corporations out there have monster R&D departments bursting at the seams with monster (3, 6, 9, and 12-month long)  research projects, and are busily preparing monster evaluations, assessments, analyses, executive summaries, and follow-up surveys and studies to support the research findings.

Many of these undertakings are aimed at identifying (in the case of the Chocolate Tsunami brand) which 6-year-olds in which towns are watching which TV shows, and who are most likely to influence their parents (or the most lenient or susceptable parent) to purchase the cookie brand on the next shopping trip.

Oh, and do they have the parent’s email address?

Small business owners know better

than to waste such time and expense.

They make the cookies, sell the cookies, gather feedback from some kids and parents, adjust the manufacturing (or pricing, packaging, promotion) and sell them again. All the while the monsters have no product. They are still doing statistical analysis of adolescent sugar intake.

But too often small business owners direct their marketing messages to the buying customers when actual purchase decisions are being made by the ultimate consumers and/or other influencers. [Women, for example, purchase more wine, but men are almost always the ones who specify what type and brand to buy.]

Small business owners often overlook that different messages need to be directed to different market targets. Parents buying cookies that they are pleaded with to get by their children may require a bit more rationality attached to the emotional appeal that’s focused on persuading the children.

“Making Waves When Dunked in Milk” may be a cute line for something named Chocolate Tsunami Cookies. It could probably attract attention and create interest for any age.

While a child may, however, simply buy into the slogan– Mom or Dad need to know that the chocolate and flour used are organic, or that every purchase comes with free quart of milk or roll of paper towels . . . or that they will be the talk of the neighborhood because their kids are the only ones who can’t “make waves.” 

The bottom line is that by focusing marketing efforts on customers alone risks losing potential business that’s generated by ultimate consumers.

Using the same message in the same ways doesn’t do it. 

KEEP your branding theme and slogan, but address different interests with different language in different media whenever your customers and consumers are different in age or attitude or responsibility or capability.

A handicapped senior may have primary concerns about the safety and ease of use for a stair-lift, while the family making the arrangements may be more focused on price, insurance coverage, and service warranty. The best way to cover all your bases is to ask customers and consumers questions, and keep asking. And Listening!

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Hal@Businessworks.US     302.933.0116

Open  Minds  Open  Doors

Many thanks for your visit and God Bless You.

 Make today a GREAT day for someone

Welcome to the world’s first

BIZ ALPHABET SERIES of blog posts

“B”…BRANDING

 Besides that you’ll find tips galore by clicking here or on the “BRANDING” tab at the top of this blog’s homepage, here are some seldom discussed points you may want to review that can put a new light on the subject. Here you go:

~~~~~~~

BRANDING is rarely thought of by many business owners and, it seems, by most of the general public, as being what it really is. Branding is a composite of all things related to a business product, service, or idea (or a cause or individual), and those who represent these saleables. All things? All things.

If you’re a business owner, manager, operator, partner, investor, or entrepreneur, YOU are the brand as much as any product, service, idea or platform you offer.

Simply stated, your actions, inactions, initiatives, attitude, behavior, beliefs, decisions, appearances –the WAYS you treat others every day– are as integrally woven into the fabric of your brand as your logo, theme, slogan, color scheme, marketing message, and “packaging.”

Like it or not – as head honcho, you have created or are carrying forward a specific parental posture that is constantly being evaluated and looked to for setting examples, offering advice, citing experience, expressing empathy, and fostering every conceivable aspect of effective leadership.

The problem is that you probably never counted on having to be both mother and father to assistants, associates, work teams, employees, consultants, partners . . . and carry your personal life family role along with you in your travels.

So how can you bring your maternal or paternal (or both) leadership role up to snuff when you really don’t care about nurturing other people’s idiosyncrasies? Well, here;s the bad news: The responsibility comes with the territory.

You cannot run any business bigger than a one-man-band with any measure of sustained success without exercising both passion (for what you represent) and compassion (for those you’re in contact with each day).

Does this mean you need to be a shrink, therapist, counselor? No, but you do need to be the parent because the business is your baby!

No one else (other than perhaps a spouse who shares the same values as you) can ever do the same justice to your enterprise that you can. No one else can sell your business message as effectively as you. No one else (other than –again– a spouse, and of course any investors) really cares about your bottom line.

It’s your job to be the leader and show people the way to feel empowered and rewarded for doing quality work on your behalf. You must bridge the gap. You must lead by example. People will rally to your mission and vision when you pull instead of push, when you show sincerity and honesty in all your dealings.

 Others are always watching what you do,

and listening to what you say,

measuring your integrity.

“All the world’s a stage,” said Shakespeare. Your spotlights are on and your curtain is up. Make the most of your business debut and all of your curtain-calls, along with every opportunity to polish your act. Have a great run!

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Hal@Businessworks.US    302.933.0116

Open  Minds  Open  Doors

Many thanks for your visit and God Bless You.

 Make today a GREAT day for someone!

If you’re not rattling cages,

reserve your business

headstone now!

                 ~ ~ ~                  

C’mon, Hal, the Halloween season gettin’ to you?

Waiting with tricks instead of treats? 

Not me. I rattle cages.

But what about you? Are you depending on others to scare up some new business? Maybe you’ve seen too many stun-gunned tongues (say that five times fast!) and zombie axe murderers on late night TV? Too many ghoulish retail displays? Maybe you almost died? 

If every chainsaw you see reminds you of a massacre, maybe you’re running on (or from?) fear? No? Well if you’re not shaking up your business every week, it may be that you’re running on ambivalence and, in turn, leading the county coroner to your business doorstep.

Investing in the status quo with your business is a no-action action that –depending on how secure your finances are– will either provoke a knife plunge into the heart of your enterprise or cause business death by potato peeler. If 2012 means continued business life, it must also mean continuing dramatic action at every level.

If it ain’t broke, fix it anyway.

Stop being afraid of stirring up the competition. The most successful retail businesses are those located in the same geographical areas as their competitors. Competition stimulates consume traffic. Your website’s not up to snuff? Bite the bullet; get some cash out from under the mattress, and pay a professional to polish up your act!

Can’t afford the advertising you want? Stop advertising. Go to (free) Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn instead. Start doing (free) public relations instead — newsworthy news releases, captioned newsworthy photos, special events (e.g., charity-based, combined with other businesses, educational programs).

Are your employees, suppliers, referrers, investors, community supporters challenged enough? Are you putting out strong motivational incentives to get the (free) word-of-mouth going? Are you running contests that provoke fun and prompt action? (Hint: No need for elaborate or expensive prizes if enough imagination is exercised).

Shake it up!

Have you given presentations at local colleges, high schools, community centers, and then promoted them and followed up with news releases and unusual photos? Have you compiled a media “hit list” of appropriate editors and writers and publishers who would have a natural interest in your business and business pursuits?

Do you have an “elevator speech”? Do you carry business cards and a notepad with you at all times? Do you ask questions 20% of the time and listen to answers (and jot them in your notebook) 80% of the time? Have you collected email addresses everyplace you go? Are you using them to send worthwhile info out?

“Business As Usual” means inactivity, nothing changing, no excitement, no hustle. It will take you straight to the business burial grounds up in the sky (or somewhere?) and you might want to stop off at your lawyer and accountants’ offices on the way to fill out bankruptcy papers. This economy has no mercy.

If you’ve got guts and gumption, nurture them. Stimulate them. Ignite them. Explode them. Make them work for you. 

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Hal@Businessworks.US   302.933.0116

Open  Minds  Open  Doors

Many thanks for your visit and God Bless You.

 Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Lions and Tigers and Bears, 

and Clients and Patients

and Customers Too!

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My! As different as each creature may be from one another, all are considered equally dangerous, equally entrancing to watch, equally exciting to find in one’s camera lens, equally cuddly, equally threatening, equally enthralling. In other words, sometimes they can all fit the same category.

As marketing targets, it’s often all for one and one for all. Professional practices (doctors, lawyers, accountants, management consultants and trainers) are small businesses with special skills and special interests. They have clients and patients. But clients and patients are customers too. They just have special needs.

All this specialization stuff, however, makes little if any difference in marketing plans, targets, approaches, strategies, or branding programs. Perceived differences matter only to professional practice principals. No one else cares. The bottom line is that we each spend our money to get a product or service.

And each of us wants to know:

“What’s in it for me?”

Whether a product or service is life-saving or life-threatening has nothing to do with whether a client or patient is considered a client or patient — or customer. All that matters is product or service performance, and the integrity and authenticity of the person(s) representing or standing behind the product or services purchased.

The issue, say some, revolves around the concept and delivery of “high trust” vs. “low-trust.” Marketing people will be quick to recite the five criteria of effective programs, campaigns, and messages. Regardless of what name is used to define a target market (customers, clients, or patients), marketing must:

1)  Attract Attention

2)  Create Interest

3)  Stimulate Desire

4)  Bring About Action

5)  Provide Satisfaction

. . . and it really must do ALL of these to be effective.

On top of that, the rule of thumb applies to ALL FORMS of marketing – print, broadcast and outdoor advertising; sales; public (industrial, professional and community) relations; promotion; merchandising; pricing; packaging; labeling; website content; social media content ; business and appointment cards; stationery and invoices.

It applies as well to direct mail, bumper stickers and building signage, plus a hundred other uses. It applies to branding themes, logos, and jingles as well as trade and professional show banners and exhibits.

When you want to know how your business or practice is coming across to others, ask. Measure people’s responses and each marketing implementation against the five criteria. 

If you’re looking for prime examples of marketing that fails because it fails to deliver all five criteria, you need go no farther than your local hospital. Hospitals breed marketing mediocrity because they refuse to spend money on outsourced creative services and convince themselves they can handle it all in-house!

Most professional practices seem to think in similar terms. The problem is that their products and services are justifiably more expensive than the local coffee shop and must carry messages that appeal to a higher level of audience needs, but that doesn’t eliminate the need to trigger emotional buying motives.

Sophisticated products and services are not sold with dumb slogans or rational, logical appeals that push features instead of benefits. Humans are humans are humans. Market from the heart. Market benefits! Pay attention to corporate advertising for Mercedes Benz.

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Hal@Businessworks.US     302.933.0116

Open  Minds  Open  Doors

Many thanks for your visit and God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

When you think 

you’re communicating

just the right amount of 

information, you’re not!

How do I know? Because you are the boss. And the boss rarely if ever gets it right the first time because what the boss thinks is “too much” or “too little” information is not what employees think, but are often afraid to ask about or say so. And when it’s not what customers think, they won’t ask or say so either; they’ll just go somewhere else. 

Okay, I know it’s making you crazy. So what does the blog post title ROTFLMBOAFOYCTBPSSOHLT mean? You should know, first of all, that this “message” actually appeared on the screen of a Fortune 500 company employee, sent by a departmental teammate. Even the recipient had no clue  

It stands for: Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Butt Off After Finding Out You Caught The Boss Playing Spider Solitaire On His LapTop. The acronym is obviously an example of a text messenger gone amok and, of course, far too little information to be understood.

Sending a convoluted message is

  like telling a joke that nobody gets.

Misunderstood verbal and written one-way messages have ended in disasters, explosions, shootings, robberies, suicides, addictions, bankruptcies, firings, lost confidence, and lost sales. Even when the message receiver has perfect hearing, perfect vision, three college degrees, twenty years of experience, and is sober, confusion happens.

You already know all the little rules about not assuming things. You’ve learned the hard way that communication can be either verbal and/or nonverbal and that both of these forms have many signals, styles, applications, modes, and inferences. You have a general sense of when you’ve said or written too much or too little.

BUT — the recipient of your communication is the only one whose sense of what’s too much or too little really counts. If a receiver on the football field cuts right instead of left and the quarterback launches a picture-perfect pass to the left, it doesn’t much matter how great the pass looked. Your message is all about the receiver.

The only insurance you have for being clearly understood is to check on what’s written or said or agreed-to with the receiver, to confirm delivery, to paraphrase statements, to request feedback. I just received an important piece of mail from three weeks ago, from a neighbor who’s been away for three weeks, who got my mail by mistake.

Horror stories run rampant through the halls of shipping, transportation, and delivery companies worldwide every day. Wrong addresses, wrong times, wrong account numbers, and on and on. Your small business cannot afford communication screw-ups. This doesn’t mean harping away and repeating things.

It means accepting the reality that others do not have the same ways of thinking as you, and that getting it right the first time will take you longer and be more work than you would like. YOU must take the responsibility to ensure that the messages people get from you are indeed the same ones you intend them to get. Work at it. It pays. 

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Hal@Businessworks.US   302.933.0116

Open Minds Open Doors

Many thanks for your visit and God Bless You.

 Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Where is your foot pointed?

YES, I have better things to do. NO, I am not a kinetics (body language) expert nor a walking lie detector. Like most business owners, I muddle through exchanges with others –using a combination of what I know and feel from experience– to decide on another person’s intents, genuineness, and ability to perform up to my belief system.

But I have written and taught considerably on the subject, and am frequently asked about practical business applications. So, remembering that you’re not licensed to practice psychotherapy, here’s enough body barometer stuff to shrink out some of those business head cases you deal with:

Let’s first distinguish between verbal and nonverbal communication, keeping in mind that: A) words themselves do not have meaning; only people have meaning, and that: B) Only 7% of communication is generally believed to be verbal. (38% is believed to be tone of voice, and 55%, nonverbal!)

Nonverbal communication, I recall, is accomplished in 9 different ways (there may be more, but who needs more?):

1. AMBULATION – How someone walks. Big differences in the messages coming from someone who swishes vs, stomps or swaggers, bounces, strides, or drags.

2. TOUCHING – The most powerful form of nonverbal communication. Consider the differences in touch for expressing anger, interest, trust, tenderness, warmth . . . and the differences in willingness to touch or be touched.

3. EYE CONTACT – When do pupils dilate? What’s in your unconscious mind about eye colors? Trust? Sincerity? Forthrightness? Does someone stare, shoot daggers, avoid direct eye contact, glance slyly?

4. POSTURING – Are arms and legs crossed defensively? Stand or sit slouched or erect. Severe threats promote fetal positions.

5. TICS – Uncontrollable nervous twitches may indicate a sensing of possible threats.

6. S UBVOCALS – Um, er, uh, whew! . . . and grunts and groans, whistles, loud swallowing, tongue clicking.

7. DISTANCING – We each have our own Space. Comfort zones vary by person, geographical region, country, and by odors.

8. GESTURING – A wave, thumbs up or down, an OK sign or angry fist, a V can all be acceptable in one place and not in another.

9. VOCALISM – Say: I LOVE my children! vs. I love MY children! vs. I love my CHILDREN! vs. I love my children! Same words, but do you hear different meanings?

STROKING arms, legs, or hair often indicates a lack of affection (perhaps at the moment, perhaps in general). See if talking about how valuable that person is to your business stops that activity.  SMILES are great, but can often be a defense mechanism. THE FACE ALONE CAN PRODUCE 250,000 EXPRESSIONS! (Weird research, huh?)

Sports guys and politicians use THUMBS UP and THUMBS DOWN. Hitchhikers point THUMBS SIDEWAYS.

CONFIDENCE is often expressed by pyramiding fingers, by hands in pockets with thumbs out and by hands held behind a stiff back.

INSECURITY is frequently communicated by pinching, chewing (pens, pencils, pipe, fingernails, gums), by hands stuffed deep into pockets, as well as by smoking, fidgeting, jingling coins, tugging ears or mustache, or underclothing, by someone who frequently covers her or his mouth and /or “ahems” often.

HOW a person lights and holds a cigarette, pipe or cigar, how he or she writes (including pen pressure), how glasses and eating utensils are held and used, how food is picked up and eaten. These are barometers. So are the ways people greet and say goodbye to one another. Handshakes (firm, wimpy, bone-crushing?). Hugs and kisses. Who touches whom?

The boss’s hand on someone’s shoulder shows authority. People in power feel comfortable touching subordinates, but not the other way around! Is it acceptable to touch a pregnant woman? Holding one’s hand to show the palm is regarded as a sexual attraction signal, especially when pupils dilate.

Watch how people move toward and away from one another — Distances? Who moves first? When?  Is someone’s foot pointed toward you when she or he speaks with you, or toward the door? Effective communications requires effort!

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Hal@Businessworks.US 302.933.0116

Open Minds Open Doors

Many thanks for your visit and God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!