The Book I am Currently Consuming

It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For is an inside look at the secret ingredient of high-performing organizations: Purpose.

Companies that have a purpose beyond making money are the companies with the best products, most loyal customers and employees and consistent success in a continually evolving marketplace. It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For will guide leaders and marketers through their own journey of understanding how their company makes a difference and how to harness that purpose for greater success.

Through firsthand experience working with some of America’s most successful companies—Southwest Airlines, Wal-Mart, Whole Foods Market, John Deere and BMW—readers will learn how to discover their purpose and bring it to life in everything they do. With a purpose in place, employee engagement is higher, competition is less threatening, customers are more loyal and innovation flows. It’s the secret to developing a more fulfilling work life as well as a healthier bottom line.

Learning from Comics

I have had advertising clients in the past that I could not help. I tried, I really tried, but at the end of the day, I had to admit to them and to myself that the PEF cancelled out the advertising.

PEF stands for Personal Experience Factor.

People heard the ads and many were persuaded to sample my client’s product or service. Then, tragecally, the PEF was not what I promised in the ad. My goal is to make people like and feel good about my client before people need them. When they need them they will think of them first and call them. Think about this and then read Seth’s latest blog post…

In between frames

Scott McCloud's classic book on comics explains a lot more than comics.

A key part of his thesis is that comic books work because the action takes place between the frames. Our imagination fills in the gaps between what happened in that frame and this frame, which means that we're as much involved as the illustrator and author are in telling the story.

Marketing, it turns out, works precisely the same way.

Marketing is what happens in between the overt acts of the marketer. Yes you made a package and yes you designed a uniform and yes you ran an ad... but the consumer's take on what you did is driven by what happened out of the corner of her eye, in the dead spaces, in the moments when you let your guard down.

Marketing is what happens when you're not trying, when you're being transparent and when there's no script in place.

It's not marketing when everything goes right on the flight to Chicago. It's marketing when your people don't respond after losing the guitar that got checked.

It's not marketing when I use your product as intended. It's marketing when my friend and I are talking about how the thing we bought from you changed us.

It's not marketing when the smiling waitress appears with the soup. It's marketing when we hear two waiters muttering to each other behind the serving station.

Consumers are too smart for the frames. It's the in-between frame stuff that matters. And yet marketers spend 103% of our time on the frames.

---Seth Godin

For Precision Tune Auto Care, good marketing is what happens when the unexpected happens. People expect to be “talked down to”, they expect they will be sold something they didn’t really need and they expect they will be waiting longer that they were told they would have to wait.

What are your customers experiencing between the frames?

Guest Writer: Greg Grimaud "Do you know where your breakeven is?"

In our monthly franchisee meetings we always cover the breakeven graph and discuss it’s truth’s. Point “B” on the graph is the place where all your dreams start to become possible. You’ve paid off your fixed expenses for the month such as that annoying rent payment, factored in your parts cost and other variables, and now you are poised to take home some cash for every dollar above point “B” that you bring in.

Only one problem, you have no idea what that dollar amount is. Not knowing what this number is, is the equivalent of going duck hunting blindfolded and expecting a bird to fall out of the sky. Like Jim Carrey said in the movie “Dumb and Dumber” when he asked the girl, “what are my chances of going out with you?” Her response was, “not good… …one in a million.” His response, “so you’re saying there’s a chance!”

This is not the kind of chance that you want to risk your entire business on. You can greatly improve your odds of success by not guessing on issues like not knowing your breakeven.
Knowing where your breakeven is, is knowing when you’re making money or losing money. It’s the day in the week when momentum changes. Because my partner and I know where our breakeven is, we know at which point we begin making money. I’ll talk about this more next week, but in the meantime, take a look at the graph below. — Greg Grimaud