Category: Marketing

The Caffeine Curve

Now for some Friday fun. This pic seems to be circulating the Interweb quite a bit; a friend forwarded it to me earlier this week.

Every entrepreneur lives off of caffeine one way or another. So what exactly happens when we ingest copious amounts of caffeine throughout the day?

Glad you asked. As this highly-scientific chart shows, you can reach deity-level elation at your peak, for those wonderful orgasms of creativity. Then you can drop down so low that you’re playing Duck Hunt with your neighbor’s dog.

The Caffeine Curve

Colorado-based cartoonist Tom Edwards is behind this hilarity. He’s pretty sure that he’s “the only cartoonist in the world who distributes his one panel cartoon almost exclusively on wheel-thrown porcelain pots.”

I’m not sure if he intended this pic to be a viral marketing gem, but it seems to have worked. This pic is on Digg and countless other blogs. He’s cleverly included his name in the pic, enabling people like me to be able to hunt him down. A smarter tactic would have been to include his URL, but hey, either way, he’s still gaining notoriety.

If you’d like to monitor your daily caffeine intake, you can purchase a mug and support Tom’s art. As an added bonus, you can even fill your mug with your favorite caffeinated beverage. Fun!

Eating Your Own Dog Food… Or Not

dshen.com It’s generally believed that using your own products is a good thing. You’re eating your own dog food, so to speak.

Dave Shen, a former Yahoo! (YHOO) employee, suggests otherwise. He writes:

I would put forth that the blindness that happens with being comfortable and focusing on yourself and your own company is precisely the way you get blindsided by some fast moving kids out of college developing something that is so cool and compelling and you see them gaining traction only after you’ve fallen behind.

What’s the best way to combat this?

USE THE BEST PRODUCT OUT THERE FOR WHATEVER IT IS YOU DO. (Emphasis his)

That’s pretty sound advice. Using the best product for your needs, even if it’s not your own, is a great way to understand why it, and not yours, is the best product out there. And if you feel bad about not eating your own dog food, you can think of it as “competitive research.”

Marketing with Lolcats

Lolpizza Now for some Friday fun. I have a guilty secret.

I’ve been secretly coveting lolcat sites, like I Can Has Cheezburger?.

I didn’t follow them the first time around. When the second wave came, I caught it and started surfing it with glee.

(I blame LOLTrek for getting me into lolcats. Someone pointed me to that link and from there, I’ve been hooked onto lolcats ever since.)

I know, I know. But what can I say, I’m a fan of corny jokes. And lolcats are about as corny as you can get.

So when David Friedman of Ironic Sans suggested Lolcatvertisements, I thought to myself: HAHAHA!

The way I see it, companies have about a week or so left in the life of the lolcat meme to come up with some clever ads that use the lolcat format.

Take a pizza and burger joint, for example. They could start with a picture of a pizza delivery guy, with the caption “I’M IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD, DELIVERING YOUR PIZZA” or it could have a picture of a burger and fries with the caption “YES YOU CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER.”

I know, I know. The lolcat thing is fading again and lots of people can’t wait for it to die. But it still makes me chuckle. Hehe.

Biz Idea: Spyware & Virus Clean-up

Wired Magazine Sometimes I come up with random business ideas. After reading the article, “Desperate Botnet Battlers Call for an Internet Driver’s License” at Wired.com, this idea came to me.

What if there was a service that helped you clean off all the spyware and viruses on your computer? Their overall mission would be to improve the security and performance of your computer, of which cleaning up spyware and viruses is just one step. There are many other performance-enhancing steps also.

They would target non-tech savvy households with computers. The positioning would be around how insecure and fragile your computer is without the proper protection. Which conjures up imagines of laptop condoms in my head, for some reason.

Oh, but then there’s Geek Squad. This is pretty much what they do right now. Except that they’re not really positioned just for computer security and performance. Hmmm. I suppose this business idea could be a marketing idea for them too.

Problem is, I don’t know of many non-tech savvy households with computers that actually use Geek Squad. I’m not sure why. Maybe people think Geek Squad is too expensive. Maybe they don’t even know what Geek Squad is.

The service I’m talking about would aim for those not being served by Geek Squad. Some audience research could determine an available segment there somewhere, I’m sure.

Perhaps the price could be promoted at the forefront, so people know this service is affordable. They’d be known as The $20 Jiffy Lube for Laptops or something.

High school kids could make up the staff, keeping internal costs low and computer knowledge high. Because, as everyone knows, the younger you are, the more you know about computers.

I’m not sure if vehicles are necessary, like with Geek Squad. If house calls are requested, perhaps a pizza delivery model could work, where the employee drives his/her own car and is reimbursed for gas. As the business expands, a fleet could be considered.

A storefront location would be important though, to show legitimacy and professionalism. Otherwise, why would you be willing to drop off your personal laptop to a bunch of strangers? Also, this would give the high school kids a place to do their magic.

So basically, this is a computer repair shop marketed as a spyware & virus cleaner to people who notice their computers getting slower or who are paranoid about malicious software. Hmmm. Think it’ll work?

ScienceDaily Week by Guy Kawasaki

ScienceDaily Last week, Guy Kawasaki ran a series of posts that highlighted choice bits from ScienceDaily. This online magazine (ezine?) aims to be The Source for the latest research news in science, technology, and medicine, by including stories “submitted by leading universities and other research organizations around the world.” Guy notes that their studies have implications on business practices as well.

So with that, Guy highlights:

Which is more effective: bonuses or raises?

For example, have you ever wondered whether giving employees a pay-for-performance bonus or a merit raise fosters greater productivity? According to this “Bonuses Boost Performance 10 Times More Than Merit Raises” in Science Daily which pointed to a Cornell study called “Using Your Pay System to Improve Employees’ Performance: How You Pay Makes a Difference” by Dr. Michael C. Sturman, a bonus yields far better results.

Interesting! Same probably goes for commission-based compensation too.

Hype Kills

…assistant professor Vanessa Patrick (University of Georgia) [and] co-authors Debbie MacInnis and C. Whan Park (University of Southern California) [published the study] “Marketing: Too Much Hype Backfires.” The study shows that “people take notice when they feel worse than they thought they would, but—oddly—not when they feel better than expected.”

This supports the old adage that people tell five others about a bad experience but only one about a good experience (“negative evangelism”?). Thus, it sure looks like “under promising and over delivering” is the way to go.

It’s well-known that losing something creates a stronger emotion than winning something, so I guess human beings are wired to feel negative emotions moreso than positive emotions?

Advertising and Sexy Content

…advertising during television programs with sexy content is less effective than during programs with no sexy content. This is the research finding of Ellie Parker and Adrian Furnham of the Department of Psychology of the University College London.

To quote Robin Williams: “God gave you a penis and a brain, and only enough blood to run one at a time.” So when you’re watching that sexy content, your brain isn’t going to be remembering a damn thing.

Here’s a three-fer

  1. Researchers at the University of Oregon found that when people watch someone perform a task that they know they’ll have to repeat later, similar parts of the brain are activated that are used doing the the task itself. The source is “Watching With Intent To Repeat Ignites Key Learning Area of Brain.”
  2. An article called “Subliminal Advertising Leaves Its Mark On the Brain” cites how researchers at University College London found that subliminal images attract the brain’s attention on a subconscious level. An implication is that subliminal advertising could work. That is, of course, assuming you don’t Tivo past the ads.
  3. Seeing the color red can hinder people from performing their best on tests. This is the conclusion of a study called Research On the Color Red Shows Definite Impact On Achievement” at the University of Rochester.

So our brain is like a sponge, absorbing not just the spilled milk, but all the dust and gunk on the floor too, for better or worse. Great.

Effective Online Advertising

eMarketer A friend recently asked, “What’s the best way to get people to my new web store?” Like many small business owners, he’s web savvy enough to start a web store, but doesn’t spend a lot of time following the online marketing industry.

“I hate spam like everyone else,” he continued, “but I’ve heard that it can be cost-effective. Should I purchase an email list somewhere?”

After I gagged, I pulled up an article from eMarketer.com entitled, “What Works, and What Doesn’t, in Online Marketing” (subscription required). If you’re a professional marketer, some of this will be obvious to you, hopefully.

The top most effective online marketing techniques are:

  1. Search engine marketing (paying for ads on search engines)
  2. Opt-in email lists (having customers choose to get email from you)
  3. Search engine optimization (making your site appear in relevant search results)
  4. Behavioral targeting (buying ads on sites that can target you towards potentially interested customers)

And what were the least effective techniques?

  1. Rented email lists (spam)
  2. Pop-up/under ads

ROI was used as the metric for effectiveness.

Most online marketers know this already. But we haven’t reached the point where this is common knowledge. Every once in a while, another small business builds a web store and believes the myth that spam, while vile & evil, is a cost-effective marketing solution. Shudder. Don’t believe the hype!

Conversations and Dialogue

You know how ideas sometimes seem to appear in two different places at the same time?

I noticed a case of parallel spontaneous idea creation today when my RSS reader included an entries from John Battelle and Seth Godin.

Battelle is doing a form of liveblogging (or web-enhanced writing as he calls it), where he’s adding to the entry throughout the day as a way to watch him think out loud. Today, he posted the third part of a series on Conversational Media & Conversational Marketing (part 1, part 2, part 3). This third post adds a new term: The Conversational Economy. To summarize:

There are two major forms of media these days. There is Packaged Goods Media, in which “content” is produced and packaged, then sent through traditional distribution channels like cable, newsstand, mail, and even the Internet.

The second major form of media, is far newer, and far less established. I’ve come to call it Conversational Media, though I also like to call it Performance Media. This is the kind of media that has been labeled, somewhat hastily and often derisively, as “User Generated Content,” “Social Media,” or “Consumer Content.”

Godin, on the other hand, posted a short but eerily similar thought:

Tony pointed out a neat idea to me. Some organizations are good at listening. Some are good at talking. A few are even good at both.

But having a dialogue is different. It’s about engaging in (sometimes) uncomfortable conversations that enable both sides to grow and change.

Two marketing minds having the same idea in two different places at the same time. Parallel spontaneous idea creation rocks!