Thursday, July 31, 2008

Sustainable Social Object Advantage.


When Jyri expanded the work of Bourdieu and Hyde amongst others and started to talk about object centred sociality, he used Flickr as an example. The photos were the object while sharing and commenting were the social gestures (or verbs as he would put it). The sociality was a source of competitive advantage.

An observation on her own behaviour made by Elizabeth Churchill in a recent talk prompted me to wonder about an unexpected side-effect of continuous improvement. What if your service develops in a way that changes your users behaviour and reduces their sociality?

Elizabeth spoke of how her former behaviour of being a frequent browser and commenter on Flickr had stemmed fom downtime while she waited for her pictures to upload. It is "former behaviour" because mobile upload has now been perfected. She uploads on the move and thus now uses Flickr solely as an archive and neither browses nor comments.

Yet again, improving a service towards seamlessness shows that seamfulness has its benefits. The formal raison d'etre may be improved, but is the overall user experience denuded? Perhaps social objects need to be in some sense "physical" (be that tactile or time-consuming) in order for the sociality to be sustained.

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Tuesday, July 29, 2008

A Simple Bidding and Estimating Technique...

I get emails all the time asking for bidding and estimating advice... Some go so far as to tell me I am selfish because I don't give away my system for free!

It's true that knowing the secrets I share in my #1 rated Bid-to-Win Estimating System will surely put you light-years ahead of other painters in the field, but they are simply too valuable to give away for free...

I busted my butt for years, working for below average pay (paying my dues and eating a lot of crow) to earn the respect of my mentor.

My neighbor runs a very successful home improvement business that currently does about a million dollars a year in business...

They focus mainly on re-models, roofing and siding as well as custom decks. His company subs out the work to local carpenters and handymen and this is how he goes about bidding jobs.

Please understand that this is NOT the best way to bid paint jobs, but it will work OK to get you started. You will not be able to grow using this method, but you will turn a profit which you can then invest into your copy of Bid-to-Win.

His bidding system works like this:

He charges $200 per day per man. So an eight hour day pays $25 an hour. Not great, but not bad either. The subcontractors don't have much in terms of overhead, there is no marketing costs or customer service to deal with. They simply go in and do their job.

Let's say there is a bathroom re-model and the estimate is for four days... Here is how he would calculate his bid:

1 subcontractor for 4 days = $800 ($200 per day)
Materials cost = $1400
Overhead expenses 20% = $440
Profit for the company 30% = $792

Total Bid for Re-Model = $3432.00

Now $200 a day is not a bad income at all - but using this method is very limiting to you! You could most likely go in and paint this bathroom in one day (walls, ceilings and trim).

My neighbor passes along all the painting leads to me and allows me to bid the jobs through my own business rather than subbing them to me through his. We have an on-going working relationship that works out great! I refer jobs to him and he does the same for me.

Using the formula I reveal in the Bid-to-Win Estimating System this job paid out like this.
  • The paint job took one complete 8 hour day and was bid at $550
  • Materials cost $102.55
  • Overhead expenses around $50
  • Total pre-tax profit $397.45 or $49.68/hour
Not bad for an easy days work! As you can see there is a BIG difference in knowing how to properly bid and estimate paint jobs, but if you are just getting started, using the method of $200/day plus materials & overhead can give you a nice starting point.

As I mentioned using the $200/day bidding method makes it very hard to grow your business because the profit margins are quite small, but on the other hand earning $1000 a week working for yourself is a lot better than earning $600 a week working for a boss!

If you are ready to go out on your own you will benefit greatly from my painting business building success systems!

The complete Bid-to-Win Estimating System is sold as a stand alone course for those of you who already have your marketing in order... BUT it is also INCLUDED in the Painting for Profits - Painting Business Building Success System as a FREE bonus...

Painting for Profits lays out 16 proven, low cost marketing tips, techniques and strategies in step-by-step detail! Painting for Profits is a complete painting business building success system which includes a quick-start guide, employee management and development system, office management system, marketing system as well as the Bid-to -Win Estimating system - all in one package!

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Marketing Isn't Just Promotion.

Proof, if ever it were needed, that the world hasn't changed that much and that the 4 Ps of marketing still prevail comes from the story of Stow Away Storage set up by two guys who noted an absence of storage facilities for sailors in their local harbour.

Obviously they'd need to attract customers and so they decided on a marketing budget of £10,000. But that didn't pan out.

In fact, they only managed to spend £3 and for that princely sum placed a postcard-sized ad in the window of their local post office for 6 weeks. They got orders worth £250,000. They'd spotted an unfulfilled need and met it.

The only aspect of the story that has any resonance with the world of new paradigms is their equivalent of the death of mainstream media. They can no longer advertise in the post-office window. It's been shut down.

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Monday, July 28, 2008

Positioning Your Painting Business...

Positioning your painting business has nothing to do with quality, longevity or price... It has everything to do with being at the top of a home owners mind when their looking for a painter.

The main focus of positioning should be to ask yourself:
  1. How do I position myself as the painter of choice in the minds of the home owners in a certain neighborhood?

  2. What actions do I have to take to make this happen?
The answer to those questions is marketing... consistent, low cost, effective marketing strategies. (I lay out 16 of them in step-by-step detail in the Painting for Profits course.)

One of my favorites - both for its extraordinary low cost and for its amazingly high ROI (return on investment). No it's not door hangers, although door hangers are great IF you know how to write them correctly.

What I'm talking about is radius marketing.

Radius Marketing is one of the most powerful and cost effective marketing strategies available for promoting your painting business!

Your next satisfied customer is closer than you think!

As a painting contractor who offers painting services, the needs of your clients and their neighbors are often very similar. Homes in subdivisions are built around the same time and as a result are often in need of similar services at the same time. This is especially true with painting!

With the Radius Marketing system for paint contractors, you can now have a tool at your fingertips to launch as little as a 50 piece direct mail campaign to the closest neighbors of the job you just completed… All in less than 12 seconds!

As far as paid advertising goes…I have found nothing that works better or is as powerful as radius marketing because neighbors love to hear your painting business was the trusted source used by neighbors or friends just down the street.

This marketing program is a perfect match for those in the business of:

• Interior and Exterior Residential Repaints
• Power Washing
• Or any other handyman type service

Radius Marketing is an innovative marketing solution. Imagine a simple, sophisticated and powerful system that automatically targets new prospects right around the job you just completed. (Or a neighborhood you hope to work in).

Best of all you can launch a powerful direct marketing campaign in just 12 seconds from your computer and it costs $39.50 per complete mail campaign (4.25x5.5 full color postcard) or $44.50 for the Jumbo 6x11 full color postcard.

You’ll never need to buy another list, lick another stamp or print another letter or card because they do it all for you automatically!

Once you’re set up, you’ll just login to the system, enter the address of the job you just left and hit the submit button. From there they handle the rest.

To view a demo of the Radius Marketing Program and see how easy it is to get a complete mailing campaign started, just log in at www.smartleadsusa.net, enter username: brad123, password: brad123. Hit Enter Jobsite Address and put in your address – about 12 seconds of effort!

It’s like having a multi million dollar print and mail facility attached to your desktop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! They even give you the mailing list!

This is truly one of the best marketing strategies I have come across in years! Be sure to request additional information from Sherie Carlson by clicking here right now!

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Common Attributes of Today's Leading Tech CMOs

Each year IDC completes a rigorous study of technology marketers' efficiency of their marketing organization. This includes over 100 of the leading tech. firms, representing over $400 B in revenue. To help separate the "leaders" from the "laggards", I've developed a Marketing Performance Matrix (2x2 matrix) to stratify marketing leaders and laggards. Each participating company is located on the Matrix as a function of the efficiency of its organizations' operations and the effectiveness of its execution. However, the numbers are only part of the analysis. We also interview the CMOs at several companies within the leadership quadrant.

Here's a bit of what we've learned from these market leaders:
  • Gain the trust of your CEO and CFO. Nothing gains the C-level team’s trust of marketing more than demonstrating fiscal management responsibilities and receiving high praise from the sales organization. Nortel’s executive team was extremely impressed with the operational rigor that Lauren Flaherty, Nortel’s CMO, has brought to Nortel’s marketing organization; including her team’s progress in managing marketing investment and aligning with sales for effective execution in target markets. Her progress gained her a sizable increase in marketing budget for 2008.

  • Stop doing more with less. Marketers need to stop the cycle of continuing to expand their number of activities with less money and staff and aim for quality and impact from a fewer number of marketing campaigns. Sun Microsystems demonstrated this discipline in 2007. Sun’s marketing leadership team has been driving the marketing organization to develop fewer but more effective GTM campaigns and has reduced the number of worldwide campaigns from 82 in the past (pre-2007) to no more than 6.10 campaigns currently in the market. HP Technology Solutions Group’s (TSG’s) CMO, Deb Nelson, has rallied her troops around three to five integrated marketing campaigns.

  • Leverage a strong, senior marketing team in the regions to stay close to the customer and improve your team's agility and reaction to market and competitive shifts. More advanced marketing organizations have established processes and infrastructure across their marketing organization that enable greater decentralization without losing management insight and influence. One example is Avaya: according to Jocelyne Attal, Avaya’s CMO, "corporate marketing needs to act more as a governance function." Citrix’s CMO, Wes Wasson, hired more business-oriented marketing executives to strengthen its regional presence while also putting a global professional development program in place.

Please feel free to contact me at mgerard@idc.com for additional information on this study or add your comments below.

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Guaranteed Quality?


My washing machine guarantee has recently expired. I know this because the manufacturer sent me a letter to to try to sell me repair insurance. Now, the selling of extended warranties at the time of purchase is big business, but I hardly think that those of us who refused in the first place are going to have a change of heart a year or two down the line.

The direct marketing spreadsheets will, presumably, indicate a positive cashflow on the excercise, but for the huge majority of customers who don't bite on this offer, the only message we've received is this. Your great product (replete with wonderful features and reliability) is now, in your opinion, a little bit dodgy and prone to expensive collapse.

I'm not sure about the ROI on that.

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Sunday, July 27, 2008

Chess-Boxing And Segmentation.


Just as brand extensions seek overlaps in imagined psychographic groupings, chess-boxing aims to bring together the number one "thinking" sport and the number one "fighting" sport. You win via checkmate or a knock-out.

This is not just transmedia planning, this is trans-sports marketing and about as sensible as much of the demographic targetting that masquerades as insight these days.

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Saturday, July 26, 2008

Traffic.


My current reading. Full of revelations about what people do rather than what they say or think they do. Full of thoughts that seem applicable to all sorts of human interactions. Out next month. Highly recommended.

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Friday, July 25, 2008

Starting a Painting Business in the New Economy

Contrary to what you may think, starting a business of your own is the single smartest action you can take... and if that business happens to be a residential Painting Business your chance of profiting wildly in this new economy is outstanding.

Here's why -
  1. As housing prices regulate back to their normal standards, before the over-inflated bubble burst, home owners understand that in order to retain the value of their home or to get a good price when selling, they must make improvements... and painting is at the top of the list.

    Why? It is the biggest cosmetic improvement and it is one of the least expensive ways to update.

  2. The tax benefits of owning a small business (painting or otherwise) are outstanding. It is a legal way to keep more of your hard earned money in your household.

  3. Working for yourself is always the smart thing to do when an economic downturn happens.

    When you are in control of your own actions you can go out and make as much money as you want. When you are at the mercy of working for a boss the best you can do is an hourly wage and hope your boss doesn't cut your hours.
Starting a painting business is really quite easy - if you have a few years of experience under your belt, you should consider at least starting a part time business with the intent of working your way into full time...

Remember what I said about great tax benefits? Well, Uncle Sam says that even education is tax deductible - that means you can invest in Painting for Profits and write it off as a business expense.

You've got to love it...

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Thursday, July 24, 2008

What Does Mind Set have to do With the Success of Your Painting Business?

Expect your every need to be met, expect the answer to every problem, expect abundance on every level, expect to grow spiritually.” - Eileen Caddy

As house painters and painting business owners we often find ourselves wrapped up in the day to day challenges of our chosen profession. There are so many things to think about and do that if one of them goes wrong it tends to throw the whole day into a spiral…

It seems like not a day goes by that I don’t see a painter in the paint store with a scowl on their face or hear them complaining about a customer or a bad employee.


You see, when we concentrate our mind on all the little things that can and do go wrong on a daily basis we tend to see more and more of them. This holds true in all areas of our lives not just our work day but relationships, health and finances as well.

Here is a tip that has helped me “Get my Mind Right” and make the day to day operations of my painting business a lot more enjoyable!


At first I thought this stuff was a little airy fairy but I have to admit in a short time I saw a real positive difference.

Here is how it works… Please don’t let the simplicity of this technique be the reason you dismiss it before you give it a try!


First start by writing a list of things you are grateful for. For example:
  1. I am so grateful that I get to be my own boss…
  2. I am so grateful for all the referrals people send me... etc.

Whatever it is (even if it is only something you want to happen) for example:

  1. I am so grateful that the ad I just placed is going to attract a dedicated, experienced employee with the desire to grow with my painting business.

  2. I am so grateful that the contact I made today is going to bring in a flood of new jobs... etc.

The idea is to get you into a mind set of gratitude and positive expectations. The best times to do this are:

  • Just before you go to bed in the evening… Give thanks for all the things that went right in your day and visualize how you want the next day to be.

Go to bed with gratitude and thanks in your heart even if your day was a struggle, it makes waking up a lot nicer!

  • Upon waking up in the morning… Looking back at my morning routine before I began practicing this technique regularly, I would open my eyes and my mind would flood with all the hurdles and problems I was going to have to face that day.

I would jump right out of bed and begin to put out the “mental fires” sometimes forgetting to even kiss my wife before I left.

Now, because I go to bed with a grateful mind set I wake up with optimism and gratitude in my heart! Before I put my feet on the floor I take a deep breath through my nose and say thank you and then mentally run down the list of things I am grateful for.


Again, I know this may sound a bit “out there” for some but because this powerful exercise is all done in your mind, no one needs to even know you are doing it!

The more you can keep your mind on all the things that you are grateful for and that are going right in your life the more those things will happen to you… Same holds true for the not so good things.


The truth is that both are available all the time. It’s what we hold our attention on that causes us to feel the way we feel.

Creating the proper mind set for success is a critical part of experiencing success.


Create your ideal painting business in your mind first and then live there, working everyday to live up to your own highest expectations.

When you hold yourself to a higher standard than anyone else can, you will always have satisfied customers and peace of mind when you lay your head on your pillow!


Try it; you may be as pleasantly surprised as I was when it really starts working for you!

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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Marketing Communication Breakdown.

Jargon often develops as a kind of short-hand designed to speed up communication about frequently discussed ideas. It is inclusive - a signifier of one having passed some rite of passage and developed a level of expertise that binds you to the gang. Trouble is, that also excludes those who are new to the game.

Some people contend that jargon is good exactly because it binds people to the world of the product/service. They have a point. Inclusivity is a great goal. But does it have to be so excluding?

It's worth thinking of better ways to welcome engagement with your business and to reward customer achivement and user effort without putting up pscyhological barriers to entry? The best jargon is simultaneously inclusive and exclusive - that which resonates with your distinctive voice but is couched in self-explanatory language.

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Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Self Awareness And The Long Tail.


The diagram comes from Seth Godin's blogpost about the long tail which he illustrated with movie examples. It's a nice device but he missed out the classic example, Snakes On A Plane.

If this had been a foreign language horror movie, it would have had very little but cult appeal and been buried in the low profit anonymity of pocket 3 where the aggregators hang out. But it wasn't. It was clearly a genre movie destined for the profitable, popular cult status of pocket 2.

However, this very fact and the noise that potential fans made on the internet caused its producers/distributers to conclude that it was, in fact, a mainstream movie with the industry holy grail of pocket 1 at its mercy. It wasn't and, as I've written before, this led to bad reactions from the first view mainstream audience, arguably a lesser box-office performance and cetainly a less profitable one in light of the increased marketing spend that was wasted.

The lessons are as follows.

1) Know and be what you are and act consistently and coherently in relation to that.

2) Don't be what you're not because you'll be found out quickly and negative word of mouth will follow.

3) Let the customers decide what you are to them. They may decide you're more than you initially thought and that will be a nice surprise.

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Monday, July 21, 2008

Under Old Management.


People like change. They like dynamism. They don't want boring, but they also like reassurance that what they're getting is different but the same.

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Friday, July 18, 2008

Houston, We Have A Problem.

Apple turned the launch of the iPhone 3G into an event, but the first day was marred by the fact that credit checks are individual and don't benefit from economies of scale. There was lots of publicity but also considerable unhappiness.

In an age of always in beta, it surprises me how many companies still focus on launch days and events and risk anti-climax as a result of being unable to service the instant demand they've generated.

Even if day one goes fabulously, you're going to have cumulatively more customers to deal with on day two and beyond, so why this obsession with hitting a home run on day one? It's not how you built your business, so why change a successful formula?

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Wednesday, July 16, 2008

10 Marketing Lessons From Conferences.


What started as a list of observations derived from recent experiences at conferences and speaking events has evolved into a somewhat contrived list of general marketing lessons designed to improve "customer satisfaction". As always, they can be extrapolated to other situations as well as making conferences more successful. For audience read customer, for speaker read product/service.

1) Know Your Subject.
The curator/organiser must be someone who really understands their subject - not some PR person focussed on selling, but someone who will craft an event that will have resonance and relevance to its audience.

2) Stay Focussed.
Keep it brief. Lectures like business books are too often padded out with extraneous examples and bogus rationalisation. Focus your speakers' minds by creating a time limit and you'll focus the minds of the audience.

3) Facilitate Interaction.
Ensure the speaker is visible to everyone at some stage so that even if sightlines are imperfect, the audience will know who to collar later when they want to follow up a point. Good talks stimulate conversations. Make sure you facilitate them.

4) Maintain Engagement.
Presentations are distilled and information-rich. They demand concentration of their audience. So don't bombard them late into the day. Inform them when they are likely to be receptive. Give them time to ruminate, relax and rehash when they are not.

5) Avoid Downtime.
Start when you said you would start. Ensure that your technology is double-teamed and flawless. Provide a seamless experience with no unexpected downtime that interrupts the flow.

6) Believe.
Trust your speaker. If you have say Sir Tim Berners-Lee in a room (not that I'm talking from recent experience), you don't need to put him on a panel. That only distracts attention from what brought you an audience in the first place and leaves your audience bemused and disgruntled.

7) Dialogue Not Monologue.
The audience is there to listen to the speaker not the egocentric ramblings of questioners, so when you open up the conversation, insist that questions are limited to one sentence and start with an interrogative. Maximise the exposure of the speaker, minimise distractions.

8) Disintermediate.
Discussion works best when one person speaks and another responds to them, so don't invoke the inefficient democratistion of taking groups of questions. The questions will be forgotten and/or unanswered and the whole process requires the unnecessary expansion of a chairman's role as intermediary. Speakers can hold their own conversations.

9) Ensure Relevance.
Ban speakers from dissipating their initial impact by laying out the structure of their talk. It's good they know where they're going but it's a creative aid not an insight. Audiences want to hear what speakers have to say, not what they are going to say.

10) Demand Passion.
The speaker must want to be there and want to tell the audience something. Speakers who dial in their talks, hate the experience or merely restate the obvious in an obvious way are anathema. If they don't care, then why should the audience care about what they're saying?

Image via planebuzz

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Monday, July 14, 2008

I Blame The Education System.


As seen at the UK's premier design/art school graduation show. Click the image to see the problem.

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Friday, July 11, 2008

Change Happens.

I recently heard an Australian resident of the UK interviewed on the radio. She was being asked about healthcare, but her comments apply to many other areas and many other organisations here and elsewhere.

This country is so wary of change. It seems to analyse everything to death and never do anything.

Analysis is good, doing something is better.

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Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Is Improvement Something To Shout About?


Is improvement something to shout about or is it simply what your customers should and do expect? If you're going to boast about an award, shouldn't you ensure that it's an award that will impress? More importantly, won't it be the customers themselves who decide if it's been a significant improvement and give you their personal loyalty award?

But very appropriate that it's improvement number 2.

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Friday, July 4, 2008

The Commodification Epidemic.


There is a lot of talk about commodification around these days, but let's not forget what a commodity actually is. A commodity is defined as a product that can only be differentiated by price.

You don't have to have a remarkable innovation to avoid commodification. A me-too product does not necessarily have to be a commodity. It may be very similar to the competition, but you can still differentiate it by distributing it in a different way. You can decommodify its delivery and retail channels.

You can even decommodify it by focussing on another aspect of the product. I'm not talking about faux emotional differentiaton here, but an aspect that is common to all your competitors. An aspect which they've chosen not to emphasise because they've overlooked the fact that its customers who decide what it is that they like about a product. You surely don't see your product as uni-dimensional?

Technology and transparency certainly mean that commodification is more prevalent than before, but that's no reason to bow to it without a fight. As I've said before, if you compete on price, you are explicitly saying that you have no belief in the intrinsic value of your product. If that's true, you deserve to fail.

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Wednesday, July 2, 2008

The Power Of Discovery.

“If customers feel like they have discovered a brand themselves, they become much more loyal,”

Ray Kelvin - founder Ted Baker

That's because they haven't been on the end of broken promises or general disappointment. Loyalty is given by the customer. It's not captured by the business.

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Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Stop Doing "More with Less"!

For several years now I've heard the adage that marketers need to "do more with less". That is, during the "Internet boom" technology marketers enjoyed the "excesses of marketing investment", resulting in the luxury of having a sufficient number of people and significant backing for program investment; while today, as a result of significant budget cuts and reorganizations, we feel the need to maintain the same number (or more) of programs and campaigns with fewer people to support them.

Well, I think that we need to stop doing "more with less". That is, aim for quality and impact from a fewer number of marketing campaigns, programs and activities. Sun demonstrated this discipline in 2007. Sun's marketing leadership team has been driving the marketing organization to develop fewer but more effective go-to-market campaigns; reducing the number of worldwide campaigns from over 75 in the past (pre 2007), to no more than six-to-ten campaigns currently in the market. Another example of this strategy is evident at HP TSG, where CMO Deb Nelson has rallied her troops around 3-5 integrated marketing campaigns.

Challenges of stopping the cycle of doing more with less include: shifting marketing's culture to be more strategic versus tactical (not an easy feat with continued pressure from sales for short-term results); achieving marketing's buy-in and alignment with much fewer campaigns, which may result in a lack of support for some products or geographies in the interest of focus, at least in the early stages of this process; putting in place key staff and processes to improve marketing organization's efficiency and effectiveness with this new strategy (e.g., campaign management, marketing operations, sales enablement, a shared service marketing team); and collaborating with sales leads and other CMO peers for development and buy-in to this strategy.

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