Marketing Ideas for Small Business - Cooking With Poo And What It Means For You
Do you know the Cardinal Sin in marketing? The one thing guaranteed to kill response and turn your potential customers and clients off faster than a frog floating in the punch bowl? It's being boring.
And there are many, many ways boring your audience: frazzling their brains with the quintessential who-gives-a-damnedness of how long you've been in business; telling them how "passionate" you are about their "success", and how many awards you have; yadda yadda yadda.
Seriously, no one cares.
Not a bit.
What they care about is two things: 1.
Themselves and their problems.
2.
Being entertained and informed.
And the second one is really just a reflection of the first, if you think about it.
This is the problem advertisers have when they put print advertising in newspapers - most of them simply write "facts" which have no interest whatsoever for the reader.
After all, no one is reading a newspaper or magazine to be advertised to, right? No, they're reading for their own selfish reasons.
Nothing wrong with that at all - and it's not even a problem for advertisers and marketers so long as they realise this is a fact of business life.
Because it's a fact we can work with and around.
Bottom line: being boring is the absolute kiss of death to any marketing piece.
And making them interesting is easy if you realise you can still be entertaining while you're advertising and marketing.
Here's a good example, sent to me by a friend recently.
The headline is "Cooking with Poo wins Diagram Prize for oddest title" Turns out "poo" is Thai for "crab".
But looky here: surely titling a book "cooking with poo" is very "unprofessional".
Uh-huh.
So it is.
But boring it ain't.
That might be why Bangkok chef Saiyuud Diwong -- whose nickname is also "Poo" -- has sold 6,000 of her little books and has her cookery classes fully booked (while no doubt her competitors are wondering what's going on and why they don't have any business).
Something I've noticed very recently in the business owners I deal with is the way their writing is changing.
It's becoming far less "professional" and much more "personal", just like it needs to be to sell.
It's taken time and effort from all of them, but it's amazing to see the difference it's making in their businesses.
Oh, and apparently, Scott D Mendelson's "The Great Singapore Penis Panic" came in third place.
Now that's really something to get you wondering, isn't it?
And there are many, many ways boring your audience: frazzling their brains with the quintessential who-gives-a-damnedness of how long you've been in business; telling them how "passionate" you are about their "success", and how many awards you have; yadda yadda yadda.
Seriously, no one cares.
Not a bit.
What they care about is two things: 1.
Themselves and their problems.
2.
Being entertained and informed.
And the second one is really just a reflection of the first, if you think about it.
This is the problem advertisers have when they put print advertising in newspapers - most of them simply write "facts" which have no interest whatsoever for the reader.
After all, no one is reading a newspaper or magazine to be advertised to, right? No, they're reading for their own selfish reasons.
Nothing wrong with that at all - and it's not even a problem for advertisers and marketers so long as they realise this is a fact of business life.
Because it's a fact we can work with and around.
Bottom line: being boring is the absolute kiss of death to any marketing piece.
And making them interesting is easy if you realise you can still be entertaining while you're advertising and marketing.
Here's a good example, sent to me by a friend recently.
The headline is "Cooking with Poo wins Diagram Prize for oddest title" Turns out "poo" is Thai for "crab".
But looky here: surely titling a book "cooking with poo" is very "unprofessional".
Uh-huh.
So it is.
But boring it ain't.
That might be why Bangkok chef Saiyuud Diwong -- whose nickname is also "Poo" -- has sold 6,000 of her little books and has her cookery classes fully booked (while no doubt her competitors are wondering what's going on and why they don't have any business).
Something I've noticed very recently in the business owners I deal with is the way their writing is changing.
It's becoming far less "professional" and much more "personal", just like it needs to be to sell.
It's taken time and effort from all of them, but it's amazing to see the difference it's making in their businesses.
Oh, and apparently, Scott D Mendelson's "The Great Singapore Penis Panic" came in third place.
Now that's really something to get you wondering, isn't it?