Читать книгу Startup Guide to Guerrilla Marketing - Jay Levinson Conrad - Страница 10

This trait may not mean what you think it means. It doesn’t necessarily mean the creativity to dream up clever headlines, compelling graphics, zippy copy, or memorable slogans. Instead, it refers to how you contend with reality.

Lots of companies come up with jazzy headlines, graphics, copy, or slogans. If you do, too, you’re just one in a large crowd. That kind of imagination will not help you stand out in a crowd. What you need is the kind of imagination that helps you stand apart from the crowd. One more clever headline isn’t going to do that for you.

In a jam-packed media environment, you need much more than that. You’ve got to face more than your competition—and we certainly don’t want to undermine them because they’re getting smarter every day. The truth is that you’ve got to face reality head on and you’re got to do something to rise above it. You’ve got to do something your prospects and customers have never seen before so that you can capture and hold their attention better than any competitor anywhere, anytime.

THE GUERRILLA MARKETING FLORIST

This is an example of a true guerrilla spirit: a tiny investment, a huge imagination, and a happy payoff. People will always spend money to solve a problem before spending to improve something that is already OK. A guerrilla marketing florist knows that this is true in every area of life and not just business-to-business marketing.

After all of the social expressions of the year-end holidays, flower sales can drop off until Valentine’s Day. One florist’s solution is a small road sign that simply asks, “How mad is she?” He never had a busier January thanks to the sign.

Let’s say you’re doing a direct mailing. You certainly won’t be the first, but you certainly do want to be the best. How do you do that? By printing something unusual on the envelope? Face it, everybody and their cousin does that. There’s no guerrilla genius necessary to come up with a set of words or pictures that will beg the recipient to open their envelope. But guerrillas have the imagination to break through that direct mail clutter and get their mailing noticed, their envelope opened, and their message read. They have the imagination to do something their audience has never seen before and that even you have never seen before.

It begins with their willingness to pop for first-class postage. We’re not talking about breaking the bank here. We’re only referring to you being willing to invest in 41 cents worth of postage, the cost of a first-class stamp. But you don’t buy a 41-cent stamp. Anyone can buy that kind of stamp. You certainly do not use a postage metered stamp because that has “boring” stamped all over it.

Do you invest in a beautiful, brand new commemorative stamp? Too easy, and to be honest, too common. Instead, you take your 41 cents worth of postage and you invest in fourteen stamps. You buy two six-cent stamps, five three-cent stamps, and seven two-cent stamps. That’s 14 stamps totaling 41 cents, the same as a regular 41-cent stamp.

You put those 14 stamps on the envelopes, do your mailing, and realize that when the recipients receive their envelopes, it will probably be the first time in their lives that they’ve ever seen an envelope with 14 stamps! That envelope will catch their attention first. It will be opened first. And the contents inside will be read first. When you study direct mail, you’re taught that the average response rate is 2 percent. People who send envelopes with 14 stamps enjoy a 20 percent response rate and even higher. We’ve heard of response rates surpassing 50 percent!

Did it take a lot of money? No. But admittedly, it did take a bit more time, a smidgeon more energy, a teeny tiny tad more information, and a whale of a better imagination. That’s how guerrillas apply their imaginations.

THE PIZZA RESTAURANT

A pizza restaurant in Indiana used imagination to perk up its marketing strategy. Realizing the intense interest in football it printed up a two-sided circular. One side read, “half price off of any large-sized pizza at Marios” and their address. The second side said in bold print “Go Hoosiers.”

It handed out the circulars at the entrance to the football stadium, and as you might imagine, after every hometown touchdown hundreds of people held up “Go Hoosiers” and thousands of people read the coupon for Marios Pizza.

Some, if doing a mailing about a product from England, send their mailings to England so they can be mailing to their prospects with an English stamp. Once again, imagination wins the day for them. With hardly any of your competitors exercising such lively imaginations, it’s no surprise that guerrillas win the day through direct mail. And that’s why one of their key personality characteristics is their imagination.

They may not know how to draw their way out of a paper bag or write even two words that rhyme, but when it comes to the imagination to stand apart from reality, guerrilla marketers are second to none.