Getting Your Offering to be “Squeeky Clean”. – How to market with a limited budget
By Kordell Norton
Who has a bigger advertising budget to get the attention of your customers? You, or your closest competitor? Chances are, you might have a challenge to compete with their marketing budget.
How can you spend less than your “competitors”: and get more attention and buzz with your potential customers?
Try this experiment.
Write down the name of three different Shampoos. Go ahead. . . .I’ll wait. You can just use the margin of this document. Come on, play along with us.
(our foot is tapping)
Got them? Good.
If you are typical then at least one of them is a brand of shampoo that has been off the market for twenty years. Prell Shampoo.
Why is that? With over 160 different types of shampoos available in the store today, why did you struggle a little with writing down three different brands?
The reason is memory folders.
You see the mind can’t keep track of all of the millions of items that occupy our lives so it tends to categorize all those individual things into memory folders.
Many years ago you saw a commercial for Prell with an expensive pearl dropping slowly through the green goop of the product. Why would anyone drop a precious pearl into shampoo? Only an oyster with dirty hair would know, but it was at least something that got your attention. It made you take a mental note of Prell. It was enough to give this brand a place in a mental memory folder labeled “shampoo”.
You have these mental folders for all sorts of products and services. Usually you only have 3 to 5 items in a category. For example: Who was the first man to fly across the Atlantic Ocean solo? Charles Lindbergh. That was easy, but who was the second? The third? That folder is not needed that much and so you probably only have one name in the “solo across the Atlantic” category.
When you ask a potential customer which product they will buy, they will most like name your brand or the brand of your competitor that most occupies their mind. This is the equivalent of Prell in the Shampoo folder. But is there a second name on their list? Is your product that second choice? Are you even listed in any of their folders?”
Here is a little known secret to help you.
Create a new folder! One that has a descriptive word in the title that describes your product and it’s special capabilities.
If I had asked what shampoos are listed in your mental folder titled, “dandruff shampoo”, you would have had different names. Head and Shoulders and Selsun Blue are the two top choices. Would you ever have written down Selsun Blue when I first asked you to list shampoos?
A new mental folder in the mind of the customer that address the unique abilities of your product and service allows you to get mental space separate from your competitors who have bigger marketing budgets and advertising messages.
Quit trying to be all things to all people. Pick those things that you do and that you have unique abilities with and that your competition can’t match. Those will set you up in the mental file folders of potential customers.
Being first in a customer “memory file folder” will get you big results.
About Kordell Norton - The Top Line Guy
Your organization has a strong interest in the "top line" for growth. As a consultant, speaker, author, Kordell Norton works with corporate, association, education and government organizations who want to focus on branding, sales, marketing, strategic planning/leadership, team building, and customer service.
Kordell was an executive with several multi-billion dollar corporations with executive suite positions in sales, HR, marketing and call centers. As a certified Graphic Facilitator, he uses highly visual processes, along with humor, and entertaining methods for powerful, high energy presentations.
Author of Throwing Gas on the Fire - creating drastic change in Sales and Marketing
He can be reached at (330) 405-1950 or at kordell@kordellnorton.com or at his website - www.KordellNorton.com
