Success is about thinking DIFFERENT…

by Greg Milner on 07/06/09 at 11:27 pm

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If an advertising sales rep, friend or well-meaning but hopelessly ill-informed family member ever gives you marketing advice along the following lines…

“Look around at how other people in the beauty industry are doing it, and do it like that…”

then here’s what you do: blindfold them, lead them out into a (preferably dark) alley, tie them to a stout post, and don’t let them anywhere near your advertising.

Doing it the same way everybody else does it is the perfect recipe for failure. Marketing is about being different, not being the same.

Here’s an example from my own backyard. Last week, I decided to sell my beloved boat, The Other Woman. (Fear not… I’m not giving up on boating, I’m buying a bigger one.)

My beloved old boat, The Other Woman. Selling luxury in this market isn't impossible, it's just a matter of thinking different.

Now, if you talk to any boat dealer, they’ll bore you to tears with stories about ‘how tough the market is’ to sell ‘luxury’ goods like boats in the middle of the GFC (Global Financial Crisis).

One dealer told me just last week he’s battling to even get the phone to ring. So I took a look around at how most people are trying to sell boats. Not surprisingly, they ALL do it pretty much the same – with a tiny lineage ad in the boating section of the newspaper classifieds.

Now, how hard to you reckon it’s going to be to sell a boat for $100K, $500K or a million smackeroos when all you’re prepared to do to market the thing is spend 40 bucks on a lousy classified ad?

Some also list their boats on websites devoted to…er, selling boats. Trouble with that is, that’s where all the competition lists their boats as well. The last thing I’d want is my prospective buyers going to a website where they can be tempted by everybody else’s boat! Worse, the owners of these boat sales sites put stiff restrictions on how many photos you can use, and how much text you can write about your boat.

Little ad, big thinking – directing readers to my own website and away from competitors…

So here’s what I did: On Friday last week I registered a website domain (all of $9), and wrote a long sales letter, complete with photos and a short video tour of my boat.

I put the website up, and then wrote a brief classified ad to run in Saturday’s paper, pointing prospective buyers at my website. I didn’t want them going anywhere near the main boat websites, where there are hundreds of alternatives.

Here’s my website: www.myrandell.com

Here’s what happened: In a depressed market, where boat manufacturers are going out of business, where discretionary spending on pure ‘toys’ like boats is way down, where you have to work hard to ferret out what few prospective buyers are left in the market… I got two boat shoppers looking at my boat within 24 hours.

The point is this: employing ‘me-too’ sales and marketing strategies will get you ‘me-too’ results. The days of simply opening your doors and beating the customers off with a baseball bat are over, if they ever really existed. You have to think harder, think smarter. Doing it the same way you’ve always done it is not even guaranteed to get you the same results any more. THe world is different. You have to think different.

Those who do will not only survive, but prosper. Those who don’t will (deservedly) fail.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

A post by Greg Milner

The odd idea, a bit of prodding, a nudge here and there, a little fun, and the occasional dose of brutal reality. Greg is co-founder and CEO of Worldwide Salon Marketing, a writer, direct response marketing consultant, specialist marketing systems adviser and coach. He (sometimes) accepts private consulting clients.