You can find the site at http://www.androidsagency.com. All new blog posts for Small Ninja will now be on the Androids site. Thanks for your continued support!

Joe

There is a possibility that I will move the contents of the Small Ninja blog over to the Androids site, which will be up by mid June 2008. Until then, I will keep posting here from time to time, but will be busy getting things setup with Androids.

Normally, I don’t like to provide verbatim links or copy from other blogs. It’s seems lazy to me. However, I’ll make an exception for Seth Godin’s new post “What Do You Know?”, on his blog sethgodin.typepad.com. This is some of the simplest, most vital advice I’ve seen summarized anywhere.

Seth Godin is considered our modern age’s marketing genius, and if you are not yet reading his blog, I suggest you do so.

“What Do You Know?”

“Three years ago, I published this list, which was very much a riff, not a carefully planned manifesto. It has held up pretty well. Feel free to reprint or otherwise use, as long as you include a credit line. I’ve added a few at the bottom…

What Every Good Marketer Knows:

• Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
• Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
• Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.
• Share of wallet is easier, more profitable and ultimately more effective a measure than share of market.
• Marketing begins before the product is created.
• Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.
• Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency.
• Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.
• Products that are remarkable get talked about.
• Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your returns policy.
• You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.
• If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.
• People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
• You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.
• What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.
• Business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy.
• Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based RSS information, consumer fan clubs) are quickly proving how well they work.
• People all over the world, and of every income level, respond to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants.
• Good marketers tell a story.
• People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
• Marketing that works is marketing that people choose to notice.
• Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to.
• Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.
• A product for everyone rarely reaches much of anyone.
• Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in an conversation-rich world.
• Marketers are responsible for the side effects their products cause.
• Reminding the consumer of a story they know and trust is a powerful shortcut.
• Good marketers measure.
• Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you’re done.
• One disappointed customer is worth ten delighted ones.

• In the googleworld, the best in the world wins more often, and wins more.
• Most marketers create good enough and then quit. Greatest beats good enough every time.
• There are more rich people than ever before, and they demand to be treated differently.
• Organizations that manage to deal directly with their end users have an asset for the future.
• You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.
• You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support and you market every time you send a memo.
• Blogging makes you a better marketer because it teaches you humility in your writing.

Obviously, knowing what to do is very, very different than actually doing it.”

Contact other small business owners you do business with, and ask them if they’d like to meet to discuss marketing ideas. Try to make sure you collaborate with people who are not in your business vertical, so as to not give away competitive advantage. Through regular meetings (weekly up to monthly), your small business marketing will certainly improve, and so will your sales. The added bonus is that as the local marketing club will also benefit your partners, so you can hopefully get paid quicker and expand on business opportunities together. A local marketing club is a very simple and effective way to jump start your marketing.

My question is why isn’t Red Bull doing a better job of helping their customers make the mental link of a can with authentic Red Bull? It’s likely that if more customers had this knowledge, they wouldn’t tolerate being sold fake Red Bull, and the questionable bars would end their shinanigans. Also, Red Bull would probably save a ton in legal fees, plus enhance their brand image even more.

If you’ve got a strong brand (or even an average brand), you should educate your customers about all of the authentic pieces of your product. This way, you don’t have to spend (as much of) your time chasing imitators.