Tag: usp

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Entrepreneurship, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life, Technology, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , ,

In Part 1, “Steve Jobs Introduces the first Macintosh, January 1984,” I discussed why “the computer for the rest of us” was such a big deal at the time. Now, I want to show you how the Mac allowed me to completely reinvent an old business model and dominate my local market for ten years. You might find some marketing lessons you can apply to your own business.

In 1984, when I bought my first (and one of the first) Mac, the bulk of my work was typing term papers and writing résumés. The difference for résumés, even with the dot-matrix printer that was all the Mac had back then, was amazing. Being able to bold or italicize, having the words appear on the screen exactly where they’d show up on paper, and most importantly, knowing exactly where the bottom of the page was and being able to adjust typographically to make things fit—W O W !

Up to that point, I would write a draft of the resume without worrying about formatting during the first interview, send the client away, type it up on an IBM Selectric typewriter (which sometimes took two or three tries, although it got better when I realized I could type on legal-size paper for photocopying onto letter-size and not worry so much about matching the top and bottom margins), and then bring the client back in to review the final product. Changes either required whiting out the error with a special paint, letting it dry thoroughly and very carefully inserting the correction, or retyping the whole bleeping page.

Now, here’s the lesson: Having access to this better technology meant I was not only able to change my business model, but create an unstoppable marketing advantage—and even back then, I was thinking like a marketer.

I went into the Yellow Pages with a little half-inch in-column listing that said “Affordable professional resumes while you wait.” (Couldn’t do accent marks in the Yellow Pages at that time.) Almost instantly, I had the busiest résumé shop in my whole three-county-area. And that slogan was my USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for the next decade. Résumés were not only more lucrative but a lot more fun than typing term papers, and within a few years, they (along with the growing percentage of students who had access to a computer) pretty much pushed out the term paper portion of my business. We rode the résumé train as the bread and butter of our business until Windows 95 started to catch on, with a résumé template that let people think (incorrectly, in most cases) that they could do their own résumés. And oddly enough, none of my local competitors offered the while-you-wait service that attracted so many people to us.

If you missed part 1 of this two-part series, https://greenandprofitable.com/steve-jobs-introduces-the-first-macintosh-january-1984

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Green Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Just back from a few days in Istanbul, Turkey, where I spoke at a conference and then got to play for a few days.

As with all my trips, I keep my marketing eyes open. Here’s some of what I noticed:

  • Turks are  maniacs for food freshness (and the food is WONDERFUL!) to the point where packing dates as well as expiration dates are common on packages (which I have seen occasionally in the US) and the packing dates are extremely recent (not very common in my own country). I walked into a very small supermarket in kind of a backwater neighborhood on the Asian side and bought a bag of nuts that had been packed just one week earlier. And they tasted amazingly fresh. That tells me that supermarket turnover has to be very fast, and that the customers are looking at those packing dates and rejecting anything too old, if even this small and uncrowded market had food so fresh. If I were marketing any product in Turkey, food or otherwise, I’d think about how to include a freshness campaign.
  • Like many tourist destinations, Istanbul has an army of men (I didn’t see any women doing this) whose job it is to get the tourist into a particular shop (especially carpet shop) or restaurant. In Turkey, they were really personable, and often started by meeting tourists on their way into an attraction, giving some useful pointers, and then saying they’ll meet you at the end and escort you to the shop (and all of them kept those promises). At least the “like” part of the know-like-trust formula is very much a part of doing business. However, most of them lack any discernible USP (Unique Selling Proposition—a reason to do business there rather than with someone else). One that did told us that his partner would give us a discourse on the history of rug-making, which was accurate (I’ll be posting an article soon based on that fascinating conversation).
  • Most of the Turks I saw had dark hair and a medium skin tone, darker than Northern Europeans but lighter than Arabs or Greeks (kind of like my own skin tone, in fact). I did meet several fair-skinned blondes and redheads. Yet if you look at the ads, you’d think half of Turkey is blonde. I could interpret this as blondes having higher status (as they seem to do in the US as well—remember “Is it true Blonde’s have more fun?”), or as rejection of the principle that marketing should use images that resemble your market, or as something else I wasn’t there long enough to understand. Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s coincidence.
  • For green marketers especially: if you want to move society to go green, make the green alternative much more attractive. Public transit in Istanbul is cheap, fast, easy to navigate—and extremely heavily used. Car ownership, by contrast, is expensive and full of hassles from icky traffic to high fuel prices to very limited parking in many areas. The result? Only 1 in 10 Istanbul residents have a car. I’m betting that once the rail connection between the Asia and Europe sides is complete (my understanding is that a tunnel is being constructed), public transit will become even more popular.
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