Читать книгу Outrageous Advertising That's Outrageously Successful - Bill Glazer - Страница 8

who is bill glazer? why should you listen to me?

My name is Bill Glazer, and I have a crazy idea for you. How would you like to make OUTRAGEOUS amounts of money from your advertising?

You might be wondering right now why you should listen to a crazy idea from a guy in a straitjacket, and why, in fact, I am even in a straitjacket. The answer is simple: TO GET NOTICED.

You noticed, didn’t you? Of course you did!

This is a book about OUTRAGEOUS advertising that is OUTRAGEOUSLY successful in a “must-see” kind of way. Here you will learn crazy-powerful tools to completely disarm the advertising-killing conditions known as clutter and boredom. In here, you will learn to create campaigns that shout: Look here NOW!

I cut through the clutter because I know how to get noticed, and I want to teach you how to use OUTRAGEOUS tactics to be OUTRAGEOUSLY successful too. It doesn’t matter what you do. In fact, my OUTRAGEOUS strategies have been OUTRAGEOUSLY successful with entrepreneurs, service business operators, authors, speakers, consultants, e-commerce and Internet marketers, small business owners, B2B manufacturers, doctors, lawyers and others in private practices, sales professionals, and even people planning to start a new business.

On the following pages, you’ll find that I’ve sold from inside of a jail cell (sorta!) and off the deck of a cruise ship steaming towards Alaska. I’ve gained customers by sending them a tiny garbage can in the mail and leaving a message from the King (aka Elvis) on their answering machines.

Of more importance, you’ll discover that I am not shy, especially about making money, and I believe that customers only simply need to be reminded that they want to give me as much money as I desire.

So before we get started and to make sure we are right for each other, let me ask you a simple question.

Do you like money?

I assume that if you have a business and you’re reading this book, you’d like more money. My goal is to lead you down the path where you don’t make just more money; you actually make OUTRAGEOUS amounts of money. If this sounds good, then read on.

MY STORY: When I first joined my father’s menswear business—Gage Menswear of Baltimore, Maryland—in 1974, I thought of marketing in the same traditional way that every other menswear business in the world did. We copied what every other menswear retailer did, treated our customers right, and hoped they would remember us the next time they needed to buy something.

At that time in Baltimore, there were fourteen menswear stores we were competing with. But over the years, the market changed and stores didn’t survive.

There was movement from the city to the suburbs and changes in fashion, and our struggle in that market was to stay alive. No one actually believed we could thrive.

My father, in the late 1960s, had actually opened a side business to help troubled menswear stores either liquidate their assets or hold a big sale to get them back on their feet. I became part of that side consulting business when I joined the family retail business.

So, my early education was on two tracks: what I learned by working in the family menswear business and what I learned from consulting with other retailers.

You’ll find it no surprise that the area I became particularly interested in, actually fascinated with, was marketing and advertising.

I began collecting customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, and purchase histories. I knew, based on their previous sales history, who to invite back and when to invite them. Of course computers, with point-of-sale software, helped a lot.

For instance, if a customer were strictly a sales customer, we would invite him back for a sale. If another customer wanted the “new” thing in the beginning of the season, we would invite him back when our newest merchandise arrived.

And all of this certainly helped us survive.

Meanwhile, I was reading a book a week, trying to learn about business and especially marketing. I was attending trade shows and going to the optional seminars—all with the goal of improving.

But it wasn’t until 1995, when I was invited by a good friend to attend a success seminar in Philadelphia, that I really began to understand what it takes to market my business to its full potential.

There were a number of famous speakers there, including Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins. At the end of the seminar, there was a bonus speaker, a marketing guy named Dan Kennedy, whom I had never heard of before but perhaps became the most profitable happenchance meeting of my entire life.

As Dan walked towards the stage to speak, my friend suggested we leave, but I said I wanted to hear the marketing guy. It was the end of the day. At that point, about 9,500 of the 10,000 people in the hall had gotten up and left.

At first, I thought maybe I’d made a mistake by staying. I wondered if we should leave too. But we figured the parking lot would be jammed with everybody trying to exit at one time, so we stuck around to hear what he might say.

Within minutes, I was totally mesmerized. He said new and different things about marketing, things I had never heard of before. Best of all, it all made sense. It was astonishing, a true “aha” moment. I just kept thinking, “I should be doing this in my own business.”

He had one idea after another, and they were all great—really great. So I ran to the back of the room to purchase his Home Study Tools and Resources and began to dive into them during the train ride back to Baltimore from Philly.

Then I did something that unfortunately few do. I put these tools and resources into motion in my business. He had actual templates that were smart and cost-effective. These were items that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce myself.

I took his specific tools and reworked them for my business. This is what I call “S&D marketing,” which you’ll read more about in chapter 10. For the first time, I wasn’t copying what everyone else in the menswear business was doing. I was creating my own marketing system using Dan’s proven and successful concepts.

For example, I incorporated sequential mailings to a list of my customers that generated a response ten times better than I had ever experienced before.

My menswear business really took off.

Of the fourteen menswear stores that were in Baltimore in 1974, only one survived. My store, Gage Menswear, was the sole survivor. But more than that, we THRIVED.

How did we do it? I figured out how to get noticed and also how to be remembered with a systematic and yet OUTRAGEOUS approach to marketing that works.

Why does it work? I don’t know. I am superman, but understanding why is not one of my superpowers. I really don’t know why it works.

But here’s the important thing to know: it doesn’t matter why it works; it’s ONLY important to know that it does work. In fact, it works OUTRAGEOUSLY well.

For example, one year I mailed a five-page handwritten letter on legal pad paper to 10,200 of my best customers telling them about an upcoming sale. You’re probably thinking, “Who has time to read five pages?” I’ll be showing it to you later in this book, but for now you just need to understand that this sales letter was the number-one most effective mailing I ever sent to my customers, and it has now worked equally as effective in dozens and dozens of businesses and industries.

In it, I told a personal story and I included handwritten SHAMELESS BRIBE coupons. I used different-sized writing and something about it seemed hopelessly amateurish, and yet it was all done by design because it also came across as compelling—something that demanded to be read.

Funny thing, this crazy mailing ended up winning the prestigious Multi-Media RAC Award at the 2002 Retail Advertising Conference.

2002 Multi-Media RAC Award

There were 500 entries, including many from major companies you have certainly heard of, but my little two-store chain won one of the highest awards given out in retail advertising. Simply OUTRAGEOUS!

But the best part wasn’t the award. The best part was the results. Those were truly OUTRAGEOUS. And when you see the OUTRAGEOUS results that come from a well-developed OUTRAGEOUS campaign—taught in this book—you will realize that the only kind of crazy I really am is CRAZY SUCCESSFUL!

BACK TO DAN KENNEDY: Two years after I heard Dan speak in Philadelphia, I noticed he was coming to Baltimore to participate in the same seminar I heard him speak at before. I wrote him a letter, stating that I would love to take him out to dinner and thank him personally for what he had done for my business in the past two years (over a 53 percent increase in sales and profits).

So I was delighted when he responded and I had a chance to meet him personally. When we met, I used the time wisely and brought along a huge stack of direct-response advertising that I created over the past two years, including my first effort at OUTRAGEOUS advertising, which was a campaign that took advantage of a sprinkler malfunction I’d suffered in my store.

Gage Menswear Sprinkler Malfunction Ad

Dan was impressed. In fact, Dan was more than impressed. He actually suggested I go into business and teach other retailers how to use my strategies in their own businesses. And that’s how this started.

Until that day, I had never considered that my strategies were something I could sell to others. It turns out—and I have lots of evidence—that my strategies are valuable to businesses in every field. And my most successful strategies are the OUTRAGEOUS ones because quite simply, OUTRAGEOUS advertising works.