Bland Marketing Leads to Sleepy Sales
Do you want to increase your company's revenue? Do you have the guts for it? If so, then marketing consultant Jon Spoelstra's new book, Marketing Outrageously, has arrived to add drive to your game plan.
A former president of the New Jersey Nets (who increased the team's revenue by nearly 500 percent), and author of such marketing guidebooks as Ice to the Eskimos and Success Is Just One Wish Away, Spoelstra offers an amazing array of examples, suggestions, tips and steps toward increasing revenue through unconventional means. Throw out old-fashioned thinking about how to build and grow a successful business. Increasing revenue by marketing is Spoelstra's mantra - and the era of time-tested marketing methods has passed.
Rubber Chickens
If you want customers and clients to notice your company, Spoelstra says you have to step over the lines of political correctness and business as usual. For example, he once sent rubber chickens to hard-to-crack customers with season-ticket renewal requests tied to the legs. In another case, he mailed out season tickets in a wooden cigar box with the team's logo burned in the top and an "Owner's Manual" inside.
"Marketing outrageously beats the hell out of marketing bland, time after time after time," the author writes. It might be harder to devise an outrageous marketing plan, but safe is not always the best way, and bland does not stand a chance against the chutzpah of outrageous.
Focus on the Prize
What are the fundamentals of outrageous marketing? The basics are as simple as focusing on the big picture and the big prize. Thinking big and using creativity are at the root of marketing plans that work, and Spoelstra writes that lack of money is no excuse for flat revenues. The first step to accomplishing better sales, according to Spoelstra, is asking the question, "What's it gonna take to