During my vacation I recently visited Bulgaria, tourist-filled but cozy Sunny Beach to be exact. Sunny Beach is a vibrant resort sprawling with numerous albeit mostly homogenous bar&restaurants. And like in every other major tourist resort, the streets of Sunny Beach were riddled with stalls and over-eager people trying to get you to buy stuff/into their restaurant. It didn't take long before I readied my marketing eye and really started to consider their activities from a proper marketing perspective. What could be learned? How would I develop their marketing? Hence my shot on best-practice street hussle marketing.
A good businessperson knows that a quality offering is the basis of everything. Each restaurant more or less offered the same foods, even though their communication mostly loudly promoted the wide scope of their variety of foods. I realized after a day of walking through the congested boulevards of Sunny Beach that same stuff; pork, veal, chicken, pizza, was served everywhere. Thus we can deduce that the "product" was the same among all competitors.
It was not a surprise that differentiation in communication and promotion were the keys to success. My favourite bit of differentiated communication was "Michael Jackson is going to dance in two minutes", shouted to a group of tourists by a employee of a beach restaurant. A bit inappropriate, gross even, considering the recent passing of the King of Pop, but I laughed (and went to have a dinner the next day). The same employee also always managed to keep a (genuine?) smile and vigorously seached for eye-contact when approaching prospective customers in the street - winner traits were positivity and genuinity. In one hand I saw many tired and apathetic, and on the other hand happy, but irritantly unsurprising marketers, but their energetic and exertive competitors were easy to spot. Not surprising: the importance of empowered people doing right things was again proven.
Flyers were the other key marketing tactic of the beach restaurants. Almost all listed the same boring typical meals offered and were filled with flashy pictures of their spaces and meals. Some had maps to illustrate the location of the restaurant. Like with husslers, they were monotonous and easily forgettable. I wondered how could the best marketers stand out of the competition if they all had more or less similar flyers? Of the dozen or two of flyers I collected, just for this blog post, only two or so included actual example prices of their meals. This is hugely important for prospective customers to assess the price level of the restaurant when making a quick decision where to get a dinner or a lunch. Even billboards standing next to restaurant exits rarely had the prices of typical meals. Customers were not given a chance to measure and compare adjacent restaurants. Horribly inconvenient and time and effort consuming for the customer!
Location and the facade were other important marketing aspects for the restaurants, but where the restaurants eager to improve their marketing, I'd believe aforementioned communication would the easiest (and cheapest!) aspect to develop. Starting with a bit of innovation in flyer and billboard design and seeking out the best employees to work as husslers would help many restaurants stand out in a crowd. Maybe then there would be more than one restaurant, Djanny, in Sunny Beach with a queue in the rush hours of the evening. It was however word-of-mouth recommendation that led me to Djanny..
My sales and marketing mantra
Grow by helping your partners and clients grow.
It's my new mantra. It's viciously obvious to anyone, but like Scott Ginsberg likes to say, one must remind him/herself continuously of the important values and matters that crystallize who and what you are and what you will become.
My mantra is about business with respect and collaboration. To business partners it means that I'm willing to give and I'm eager to help them become better. It's the same with my clients, in addition that I seek a bigger share of their wallet and heart and inseparably tie their growth potential to my own.
What's your business mantra?
It's my new mantra. It's viciously obvious to anyone, but like Scott Ginsberg likes to say, one must remind him/herself continuously of the important values and matters that crystallize who and what you are and what you will become.
My mantra is about business with respect and collaboration. To business partners it means that I'm willing to give and I'm eager to help them become better. It's the same with my clients, in addition that I seek a bigger share of their wallet and heart and inseparably tie their growth potential to my own.
What's your business mantra?
I laugh at social networking startups
.. or so I thought.
Everytime I'd come across a new social media networking business, I'd shake my head. It's a social network for people who grow their own oranges. I intend to fund it with advertising.. and stuff. "OK, cool if its your thing", I'd say, "but think about the business model".
But soon I realized that there's two reasons why you shouldn't dismiss these startups/concepts off the bat.
1) Gauss. You need volume to bring out and elevate the best networking sites. There are a thousand composers for each Mozart.
2) Marketing. No, I'm not giving the entrepreneur a dime for traditional direct response or brand marketing in his network. But I will be interested in whether my offering is relevant and useful for the network. Having this figured out, I'll be interested in who is my spokesperson in the group - who will passionately talk about my offering and recommend it to others in the network. And if the entrepreneur is able to provide me answers to these questions, I might pay him for it.
Everytime I'd come across a new social media networking business, I'd shake my head. It's a social network for people who grow their own oranges. I intend to fund it with advertising.. and stuff. "OK, cool if its your thing", I'd say, "but think about the business model".
But soon I realized that there's two reasons why you shouldn't dismiss these startups/concepts off the bat.
1) Gauss. You need volume to bring out and elevate the best networking sites. There are a thousand composers for each Mozart.
2) Marketing. No, I'm not giving the entrepreneur a dime for traditional direct response or brand marketing in his network. But I will be interested in whether my offering is relevant and useful for the network. Having this figured out, I'll be interested in who is my spokesperson in the group - who will passionately talk about my offering and recommend it to others in the network. And if the entrepreneur is able to provide me answers to these questions, I might pay him for it.
Fax marketing aka Fax-a-spam
In the hustle and bustle of the office, the fax machine beeps and whirrs. A fax has arrived. And also, it seems, a full-fledged marketing effort. Are you kidding me?
My office receives a couple of feebly targeted faxed marketing messages every quarter. Unsurprisingly, they mainly come from companies promoting their own fax marketing service. The latest I noticed on the trash bin was from yesterday. I was baffled. Fax marketing, it’s not an urban legend?
Similar to email marketing, fax marketers praise their low cost (only 3.5 eurocents per sent fax!), huge reach (fax numb.. *cough* contact details of over 100 000 companies!) and ability to target specific segments. Give me a break.
In the era of email.. ah nevermind, since the era of dinosaurs only few decision-makers have had their own fax numbers. Most companies, my clients for example, easily survive with one faceless company fax number which is monitored by an assistant/lobby clerk/other non-decision maker. With this in mind, how can these firms claim to have any ability to reach anyone their customers seek? In essence their business could be sending emails to companies’ info@company.com mail address. Granted, someone could actually read their fax, but if I was contemplating fax marketing I wouldn’t risk irritating my customer.
And talk about wasting resources. First of all, printing consumes electricity and paper and wears the machine. And a fax marketer isn’t consuming anyone’s paper (without permission!) He’s consuming his customer’s paper (1.5 eurocents a piece thankyouverymuch). Seth Godin would have a stroke. I’m having a stroke, between laughs. Fax marketing really isn’t 21st Century and it sure isn’t a part of any aspiration to sustainability.
So next time you receive a faxed, undesired marketing message, please remember to recycle the paper.
My office receives a couple of feebly targeted faxed marketing messages every quarter. Unsurprisingly, they mainly come from companies promoting their own fax marketing service. The latest I noticed on the trash bin was from yesterday. I was baffled. Fax marketing, it’s not an urban legend?
Similar to email marketing, fax marketers praise their low cost (only 3.5 eurocents per sent fax!), huge reach (fax numb.. *cough* contact details of over 100 000 companies!) and ability to target specific segments. Give me a break.
In the era of email.. ah nevermind, since the era of dinosaurs only few decision-makers have had their own fax numbers. Most companies, my clients for example, easily survive with one faceless company fax number which is monitored by an assistant/lobby clerk/other non-decision maker. With this in mind, how can these firms claim to have any ability to reach anyone their customers seek? In essence their business could be sending emails to companies’ info@company.com mail address. Granted, someone could actually read their fax, but if I was contemplating fax marketing I wouldn’t risk irritating my customer.
And talk about wasting resources. First of all, printing consumes electricity and paper and wears the machine. And a fax marketer isn’t consuming anyone’s paper (without permission!) He’s consuming his customer’s paper (1.5 eurocents a piece thankyouverymuch). Seth Godin would have a stroke. I’m having a stroke, between laughs. Fax marketing really isn’t 21st Century and it sure isn’t a part of any aspiration to sustainability.
So next time you receive a faxed, undesired marketing message, please remember to recycle the paper.
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