This Saturday's Video

One passenger on Amtrak apparently did not like the "quiet car" restrictions.  As you'll see from the video, not only is she unwilling to abide by the rules, but she is "very well educated."  If she came to you for advice on how to repair her image after being caught on tape behaving badly, what would you recommend?



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Physical Store Equalizer: Making Online Stores Pay More

Here's a question for you:  Should retailers that have brick and mortar stores pay less for the products they purchase from manufacturers than their online competitors do?  I ask this question because I recently read an article by Rafi Mohammed, a pricing strategy consultant, and author of The 1% Windfall: How Successful Companies Use Price to Profit and Grow .

Mr. Mohammed says they absolutely should. In the Harvard Business Review article, he shared an experience he had while shopping for a television set last Christmas to illustrate the point.

"I searched around online, and settled on a highly-discounted model from an Internet retailer. Before buying it, I stopped in at Sears to check its selection. A helpful sales associate came by to talk about my choice. I'd focused on brand and pixel clarity as my primary criteria. The associate explained why I should also focus on other attributes such as the refresh rate (important for fast moving images) and LED backlight (which provides brighter display and greater contrast). That brief tutorial made me rethink my purchase — and in retrospect, he saved me from buying a model I'd have regretted."

For years, we've been told that people are willing to pay premium price for great service.  But according to Mr. Mohammed, that idea may soon be a thing of the past  As it was demonstrated in his television shopping example, perhaps people want the best of both worlds.

 "It's time for a new system in which manufacturers help compensate physical retailers for the value they bring to the sales proposition. They can do that by offering brick and mortar retailers lower wholesale prices than their web counterparts. I call this discount the Physical Store Equalizer, or PSE," added Mohammed.

I think Mr. Mohammed's idea is interesting but I think it somehow goes against the grain of a free market system.  Retailers that own physical stores will do what they've always done, come up with new and better ways to attract customers.  Maybe they'll even come up with innovative ways to get information-seeking customers to commit. And what about online operations, wouldn't that penalize them for not having a physical store?  I'm not quite sure, but PSE just seems to over-reach in the quest to equal the playing field.

So what do you think about the Physical Store Equalizer theory?

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This Saturday's Video

Chances are there are lots of interesting stories that you can share about your business. Marketing your business is not always about the direct sell. Have you thought about sharing the things that your company is doing that are outside the sales channel? What about charitable and volunteer participation? Do your employees play in a league? Share your stories with the world. Invest in a digital HD video camera such as the Hero from GoPro. For less than $300 bucks you can capture all the action in high quality high def. And for another couple of hundred dollars, you can purchase a piece of stabilizing equipment to avoid those annoying jittery shots. If you want to create effects, trim scenes, add text or play with transitions and more, use video editing software, such as Cyberlink's PowerDirector 9 Deluxe (less than $50). You'll have a professional looking video that will add another dimension to your marketing efforts when you place it in your social networks.

Considering the fact that you run a small business, would it be worth your time to produce a video to showcase a non-sales activity?

Ringing Up Sales with Long-Form Advertising (Part 2)

In part one of this post (yes, I realize that it was nearly two weeks ago, and for that I apologize to you) I covered long-form advertising for television. In this post, I want to talk about using long-form advertising, or infomercials or paid programming, on radio. Having been a radio talk show host for many years, I have a special fondness for radio. I really like radio for both the intimacy and the immediacy of the medium.

The problem with most infomercials is that they come off as one big sales pitch. Of course they are, but I think that stations, both radio and television, do their advertisers a disservice by having a more-or-less "hands-off" approach to this form of advertising, which by the way, helps to shore up a station's bottom line. By "hands-off" I refer to the common practice of accepting the advertiser's cash, but doing little else in terms of production value, or anything else that might help to make the paid program successful.  I fully understand that there are legal considerations, thus the need for disclaimers, but still, stations could do so much more to help advertisers with their infomercials.

A few years back, when my nightly program was cancelled to make way for a nationally syndicated show, I was eased over to weekends and fronted a few paid programs. I decided going in that I would approach the new gig quite differently than paid programs traditionally are done. I talked with the client and told him that I had some ideas to help make his show sound better. He liked my ideas and they worked very, very well. I worked with this particular client for nearly two years. Along the way, I also worked with a couple others and each time, I approached them with my ideas, and each client enjoyed tremendous success.

I took those strategies for radio infomercials and I then developed them into a proprietary system which I use with my clients that want to produce a radio infomerical. In short, a successful radio infomercial depends on many of the same variables as a tv infomercial: the product should be something that people will want to purchase; the pitchman (or woman) must know the product thoroughly, and the pitch person doesn't necessarily have to be you.

The keys to success when doing a radio infomercial is to play to the medium's strengths; as best possible, try to create a show that is as seamless as possible from the station's format, and finally, don't hard sell, relax and talk just as you would to a friend about your product or service.

Take a listen to an infomerical that I "co-hosted" where the client was selling real estate and financial services. I selected this particular show for this post because there were some technical problems--and that's the kind of thing that can happen when doing live radio.  I think that a more organic approach actually appeals to listeners more than a highly scripted show.  Unfortunately, there's no capacity for inserting an audio file with Blogger, so, you'll have to follow the link to my website, and near the top of the page, right next to the Blogger logo is a media player, click play to listen to the infomercial.

What do you think are the pros and cons of infomercials?

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