There are ones for blokes, first aid, flight ones, beach and car glovebox.
They have taken the scouts be prepared motto and converted it into pocket sized convenience. What a great niche business idea! How can you take what you do and make it more convenient for people?
A fascinating article on Neuro-Marketing in The Age highlighted some brilliant research being done by a Melbourne company who uses science to measure brain responses to ads and other programs.
Neuro-Insight (for a hefty fee) can test subjects brain response to ads and in particular the emotional response of the person viewing the ads. Why is this useful? They can test how emotionally affected a person is by an ad and how motivated they are by the ad.
So what are some examples? John West tested one of their John Waters ads for fish and found that they had their sales message positioned in the wrong place in the ad, and that they needed to edit the ad for greater power.
The use of Climb Every Mountain by the NAB was a great choice.
… And that men are more engaged in The Farmer Wants a Wife than women! (0.83 on a scale of 0-1 compared to women on 0.6)
What does this mean for small business marketing? Well, neuromarketing is outside our price bracket for a while yet – $45,000 to test 50-100 people is quite challenging for most small businesses.
However, the take-away for small business is that triggering an emotional response in the minds of your customers works – provided it is in the right place at the right time.
The other take-away is even the big guys make mistakes, which is why testing and measuring is vital. Even small business can try and then adjust their campaigns for better results.
I was checking out the blog of Koodoz Design in Melbourne and they had a brilliant parody video from You Tube for all graphic designers and marketing people. It is called “Make My Logo Bigger”.
Unfortunately it it too true to be funny for many designers and marketing companies. With SEO copywriting we need to remind clients that they need to talk more about their customers and less about themselves, designers have the challenge of clients wanting huge logos, weird colours and no white space.
Check out the video and then the next time you are tempted to make your logo bigger, then remember the clip (and listen to your expert advisors).
The Courier Mail on the weekend talked about the results of a blitz of workplaces employing restaurant and cafe staff in central and north Queensland. More than 50% of the 151 small businesses were not complying with workplace laws.
The sort of mistakes that were found were incorrect details on payslips; inadequate time and wages records (e.g: timesheets); incorrect wages rates, loadings and penalty rates.They face penalties of up to $33,000 as well as back-pay to the workers.
The thing that amazes me is that the Industrial Inspectors were surprised at the result! From my experience small businesses have been really struggling getting their heads around Workchoices and the implications for their business. It is not made any easier by the government announcing it had made sweeping reforms to Workchoices (which in real terms meant two bits of bugger all to the vast majority of small businesses).
No big changes have been made! We are still stuck with the crappiest piece of legislation ever drafted in Workchoices, and small businesses trying to work out which bits of the State legislation (if any) should they be following and which bits of the thousands of pages in the federal.
That’s why we put together our Instant HR Policies and Procedures Manualto try and simplify what is an absolute nightmare through the state and federal jurisdictions. We keep watching Federal Parliament hoping that real reform to the legislation and clarity will come back to small businesses in the very near future.
We look forward to sharing our next edition of the Manual with all current owners when that day finally arrives. Until then – keep your Manual handy and avoid being one of the statistics!
One of the cleverest marketing strategies of recent times was completed by Wizard Homes Loans last week. Australia has had years of increases to mortgage interest rates – initially only when the Reserve Bank raised the rates to put the brakes on the economy, but in the last 12 month banks and home lenders had been increasing their rates independent of the Reserve Bank.
This week it is widely tipped the Reserve Bank will drop interest rates, which should mean home lenders will follow suit all things being equal.
However, Wizard decided to drop their rates 5 days before the Reserve Bank officially have dropped theirs. They combined this with a very calculated press release campaign to the media.
The media storm that has followed their announcement is worth millions in free press. Every current affairs show, TV bulletin and newspaper has trumpeted Wizard – generally with front page coverage. They have demanded the other banks match Wizard’s move, but the other banks have been noticeably shy of doing that (which meant Wizard garnered another few days of free publicity denouncing their competitors).
What is the marketing lesson? By doing what you were going to do anyway, but doing it earlier than everyone else, and telling everyone what you have done, there is great potential for taking the moral high ground (and gaining massive publicity in the process).
Wizard will be able to use their strategy in marketing for years to come – “first to drop rates when the others didn’t” comes to mind.
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