UnMarketing. Stratten Alison
moving.
They just stared at him. Scott assumed it was because of the shock that set in due to the sheer brilliance they just witnessed. Nope. One replied: “No offense,15 but that is going to cost us a lot of money! This is a little far-fetched.” When he asked them how much it would cost in food, they mentioned maybe a few thousand dollars, which resulted in this exchange:
How much did you guys spend on that magazine ad this month?
About $5,000.
How many customers did it bring in?
We don't know.
It was his turn to stare blankly at them. They weren't biting, so he even offered to guarantee it would work and to withhold any consulting fee until they met an agreed-on attendance rate for those nights. The food cost and the fee would have been less than the amount they paid for that ad, plus the guarantee! No dice.
In the end, they decided not to go with the plan and are no longer in business.16 Sometimes you've got to think like a customer. Why would someone go to your place if they have never heard of it? Trying out your food and service is going to cost them money, and they have to take all the risk. This is amplified in a market where there are tons of competitors, and all kinds of choices that I already trust are available. The value of having a packed restaurant would also have affected people walking by, seeing a busy new place filled with people – that is the kind of restaurant they would have come back to try.
Businesses need to stop seeing events as an expense, but rather as an investment. People will pay for ads, but complain about attendees taking advantage of free events. Recently at a conference a woman approached Alison with a story about the cycling store she works at. She was incredibly frustrated because they had been holding free events for the community and not seeing a lot of in-store returns. “People come out to the free event and then go to Walmart to buy their bikes,” she told Alison, with a look of contempt on her face. We totally understand the frustration of “show-rooming” in brick and mortar locations, where customers use the store to learn about products and then go elsewhere for deals. However, in the case of an event, you need to measure your success in awareness – not in direct sales. The same store would have spent just as much on a local newspaper or radio ad, without the opportunity to fill their store with cycling enthusiasts. Events are an investment in the community, and with regard to the potential for future customers, they are not something you can necessarily expect an immediate return on.
If you have confidence in your establishment, your first priority is to get people through that door. They can't come back or tell others about you unless they show up in the first place.
7
COLD-CALLING
It's been seven years since we wrote this story and maybe it's us getting older or softer, but truthfully any marketing can work in a certain context. Fans of the UnPodcast17 might expect knocking on our door with a sales pitch to be a first-class ticket to public shaming, but every once in a while they'd be wrong. If your business is local, like a company paving one driveway on a street, then offering a deal to the neighbors could keep you in business all summer long. Lawn-care, snow-removal, painting, and other home maintenance businesses can successfully rely on this kind of door-to-door cold-calling. As a matter of fact, as we type we're waiting for beef samples from a local farm co-op who we learned about on our doorstep. So cold-calling can work! Just don't tell the investment advisor who rang our doorbell while Scott was in his robe one morning; he won't be coming back any time soon.
Nothing works and everything works. From cold-calls to direct mail and, yes, even spam. It all depends on who your audience is and what you're selling.
So you need to remove the trust gap and get people to try you. Now, how exactly are you going to do that? Good question. Almost 10 years ago, Scott was sitting in a friend's office talking about typical guy stuff,18 when his phone rang. He picked it up, listened for a few seconds, and began to berate the caller on the other end. Scott's favorite line was, “Don't you have anything better to do than to try to sell me your crap?” After he slammed down the phone, they agreed on how big a pain it was when people would cold-call them, interrupting their day. They finished their chat, and then he excused himself with the line, “I gotta go, Scott, I have to make my calls for the day.”
Scott just stared at him with one eyebrow up.
“Chris, you just raked that guy over the coals because he cold-called you, and now you're doing it yourself?”
“No, no, Scott, I'm calling these leads to introduce them to a product they need!”
Scott could already feel the migraine coming on.
And this is where the idea of UnMarketing all began. Scott had the realization that most companies are guilty of hypocritical marketing. Why do we market to people the way we hate to be marketed to? As business owners or employees, we make sure to hire gatekeepers who don't let pesky salespeople get through, and then we make quotas on how many calls our own representatives have to make.
According to the 2009 Economic Report of the President, 72 percent of Americans signed up for the National Do Not Call List. Two hundred twenty million19 people collectively said, “Stop it!” Yet companies try to get around these loopholes so they can still interrupt our day by trying to pitch their wares.
People still teach courses on how to cold-call better. That's like finding a better way to punch people in the face. People won't like it, but darn it, you can do it better! You hear phrases like “Every no leads you closer to the next yes!”20 We know people who become physically ill at the thought of making “their calls.” You don't have to do this. If you hate doing something, you will never do it well. In this book we talk about alternatives to cold-calling that are more effective and based on engaging with your market at every point of contact. There is nothing engaging about a cold-call.
8
AIMING YOUR COMPANY AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL
Twenty-five years ago, we loved leafing through three big books: Encyclopedia Britannica, the Big Book of Amazing Facts, and the Yellow Pages. Maybe we wanted to read them because of our lack of friends in third grade, or for Scott, it may have been spurred by the avoidance of people commenting on his bulbous head, or perhaps it was just a general interest in things that drove the desire. Whatever the reason behind it, we could sit there for hours with those books.
Fast-forward to the present day. The encyclopedia has been replaced by Wikipedia, the big book is now called the Internet, and the Yellow Pages are called Google. Yet many businesses and phone directory sales reps continue to use these big hunks of paper and try to justify their use of them. We've had this debate with many people about businesses using tools like the Yellow Pages. Most people say it is a great doorstop, booster seat, or a thing to beat people with when they don't pay up on a gambling debt. But let's look at the case that most people say justifies using them: “They work in some markets. People still use them. Like old folks, shut-ins, and people who are still locked into AOL contracts.”
So, let's roll with that – people who still potentially use them. We have a few issues with this way of thinking.
■ You are aiming at the bottom of the barrel (the hierarchy of buying). As you can see when you look at the hierarchy, even people who use the Yellow Pages on occasion will only go to them if they don't already have a service provider, they don't know anybody who could perform the service, they don't know anyone who knows anyone, and they have never even heard of anyone in the field. So no relationships, no word of mouth, nothing. And even if someone were at that point, you would still have to get that person to notice you.
■ Paper spam. E-mail spam works on the premise that if you blast it out to a million people, a fraction of a fraction may be in the market for the product and a fraction of that may
A surefire way to know you're about to be offended is when someone says this. Also true with “Nothing personal” and “Don't take this the wrong way.”
We're not that cocky to think they went out of business because they didn't use the idea. Just sayin'.
Nothing of any importance to the world.
We assume that the people who didn't sign up don't know that they can or are very, very lonely.
We literally had a physical reaction typing that line. Scott may vomit if he types it again. You've been warned.