Doing Something Remarkable

My cell phone rings and caller ID reads “Unknown” number.  I looked at my phone then turned off the ringer.  It doesn’t matter if it’s from my mother, if the caller ID says “Unknown”, I won’t answer.

A few hours later, I noticed the caller left a voice mail.  She said,

“If you live in Las Vegas area, please press # after the beep (then beep), if your household income is over $45K a year, press # after the beep (another beep)”.

She went on to say “That’s it, and if you want to claim your free vacation…”, as you can tell by now, it was an automated timeshare solicitation.

The solicitation was untargeted, spam and time (or opportunity) costly.  There was no Permission Marketing in place, and the offer didn’t promote WIN-WIN.  The same thing happens when sending and receiving junk mail.  The ads are hardly targeted, difficult to unsubscribe and take up room on your kitchen table (and in your mailbox).

When businesses communicate with the masses, their message naturally gravitates towards the “general interest” of the recipients (spray and pray marketing).  But the problem is, this is the population that faces so many choices every day and has no time to choose.  People don’t care about anything you say, they just have no time to pay attention to your message.

So how should your organization approach advertising?

Do something remarkable – Do something so remarkable that others cannot help but to tell others about your organization.  Los Angeles based KogiBBQ @kogibbq (Korean/Mexican fusion), operates two trucks and drives around LA everyday with no established driving route.  The only way their customers can find the trucks is through its Twitter communication.

KogiBBQ tweets their route and time (Olympic & Wilshire at 6pm tonight!) then when the trucks arrive, there are usually 2 hr waiting line, people trying to eat Korean/Mexican tacos, burritos etc.  The food is great and the concept is mind-blowing, people tell others about KogiBBQ with no need for advertising (and the business has only been in operation since Nov. 2008).

Build Internal Referral System – Instead of mass advertising, incentivize the existing customer base that will be happy to give you referrals.  Once in Hawaii, I was a hotel concierge.  The smart restaurants did not hesitate when contacting me about their referral system, and I had no problem recommending them.  You’ll find some of your customers will do the same for you.

Mesa is is a fairly small and close community but enough population to sustain many industries (population 450,000) — it is much cost effective and less intruding to focus on recruiting those who are already sold on your products and services than evangelizing new ideas to people who don’t care anything about your organization.

But you’re different, you’re smarter than the average folks who don’t try to dramatically improve the quality of your organization.

So Mesa, let’s do something remarkable together.  We can do it!

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Tagged as: branding, remarkable, Social Media, twitter