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Sometimes a great way to refresh your business and earn some buzz is by shaking things up and breaking a few traditional business rules. A few ideas to get you started:
1> Your store hours
2> Your website
3> Your order process
4> Check it out: Rogers Park Cheetos
1> Your store hours
If you’re trying to shake up the supply and demand ratio or inject a little buzz into your business, try adjusting your store hours. Los Angeles’ Never Open Store — a tiny shop filled with eclectic art, clothing, and antiques — only opens when owner Stephanie Mata feels like unlocking the doors. In an interview with the L.A. Times, Mata explains she’s often working in her shop (assembling crafts or composing art) and doesn’t want to be bothered. She also likes to hand-pick her clientele. The thinking goes against most basic business principles, but it works for her. While other stores have “For Lease” signs in the window, The Never Open Store has a steady flow of hand-picked customers and plenty of curious outsiders trying to get in.
The Lesson: Mix up your store hours — a special midnight sale, an all-day event, unconventional weekend hours — to break the rules and your business rut.
According to Google, there are now more than a trillion active URLs on the web. That’s a trillion reasons to consider breaking a few online rules to make yours stand out. Ad and design agency BooneOakley did just that when they did away with their standard website and compiled everything into a single YouTube video. Their creative, functional, and unconventional website earned them a bunch of headlines, lots of positive feedback, and some well-deserved admiration for their bravery.
The Lesson: With so much competition on the web, you risk being invisible if you’re not willing to risk breaking a few rules.
Your order and fulfillment process holds lots of opportunities to amaze customers (and break a few old-school rules, too). While legends like Zappos and Amazon continue to redefine the online ordering experience, few offline brands have been more daring in reinventing the order process than Japan’s small Ogori Cafe. Though bold, the concept is simple: You get what the person before you ordered, while the next customer gets what you order. Initially, the idea seems ridiculous, but it leads to a bunch of conversations, curiosity, and creates a sense of adventure among customers.
The Lesson: The purchase process is a huge part of the customer experience, and most of your competitors are overlooking opportunities to make it unique.
Blogging is a paradise for rule breakers. Take for example this blog that photographically chronicles nearly two years of abandoned Cheetos bags around Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. It’s a funky concept, and after checking out a few of the photos, you might never look at a lonely, empty bag of Cheetos the same again.
Brian Goulet makes handmade, inscribed wooden pens. Truly fantastic stuff.
But how does a one-person business stand out in a mass-produced, mass-marketing world? A small business can’t advertise their way past the clutter. You can’t do a mass-outreach campaign.
But you can use your uniqueness to your advantage.
Do what Brian did: Start giving unique products to loud people (like me). Bloggers, press, evangelists, socialites, and influencers. We each reach more people than Brian can, and his product is something that we use when other people are watching. We carry it around, we sign books with it — and people ask where we got it.
It works because a mass-produced product doesn’t get remarked upon. Everyone has it. The specialness is what starts the conversation.
That’s how word of mouth happens — one conversation at a time.
Why are the videos on our website copyrighted? Why are they in some weird proprietary player?
Why can’t people just grab them and put them on their blogs and websites?
I thought the whole point of making corporate videos was to get press and exposure.
Doesn’t making the videos impossible to share defeat the purpose? Aren’t we wasting a massive (and expensive) marketing asset?
Suggestion: Take every video the company has ever produced and get it on YouTube tomorrow. Link to the YouTube video from our sites instead of using our own player. If we do that:
Every prospect who watches a video will be able to share it with colleagues, increasing leads and sales
We’ll get more leads for free, because YouTube is the second largest search engine (bigger than Bing and Yahoo!)
We’ll get a ton of free coverage and a ton of web traffic
Our fans’ blog posts about us will be more interesting and accurate if they use our video instead of making up their own stuff
Your little business may not generate break-through buzz. But a crew of similar businesses with more to talk about can become a buzzworthy story.
12 local Chicago childrenswear designers joined together to create the Kooky Children’s Shop. They now have enough collective activity to support a group website and pop-up stores around the city.
Come to BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media on April 7 in Cincinnati to hear Dell, Duke Energy, Procter & Gamble, Hilton Worldwide, AT&T, Tyson Foods, Rogers Communications, and General Mills share case studies in corporate social media.
You’ll learn how to get started, get past roadblocks, and make your social media program phenomenal — and you’ll see some brilliant presentations like this one from BlogWell San Diego:
Alexandra Wheeler and Matthew Guiste’s big idea: If it doesn’t matter on Twitter, it doesn’t matter.
Alexandra and Matthew’s case study covered how they got management buy-in, how social fits into a larger digital strategy at Starbucks, and how they use Twitter as a monitoring tool.
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Finding a good teammate means better ideas, more resources, and better buying power. A few opportunities to make it happen:
1> To sample new technology
2> To get better pricing
3> To make it familiar
4> Check it out: Interactive Kaleidoscope
1> To sample new technology
It can be tough to get your new technology in the hands of consumers to try out, let alone adopt. Ford faced this issue recently with their SYNC technology, which generally requires driving a car to experience. To make it easier for customers to sample it, they found a partner in Best Buy which allowed customers to try out SYNC in stores and receive a $5 Best Buy rebate. In the first month of initial tests in about 30 Texas stores, Ford was able to demo the technology to more than 3,500 customers.
The Lesson: Even if you’re not a tech brand, get your new technology in the hands of customers by teaming up with a business that is.
One of the big advantages of teaming up with another business is buying power. After years of intense competition, Ohio-based Scorchers and Wing Warehouse found a way to work together. With costs increasing, the two restaurants explored opportunities to buy in volume. But the partnership quickly blossomed into something bigger: Wing Warehouse owner Darrell Guariniello ended up buying out the Scorchers owners and hiring them as employees — immediately increasing both market share and buying power. While it may seem like a long shot, it never hurts to ask a competitor if they’re interested in exploring an opportunity that both businesses can benefit from.
The Lesson: It might surprise you how friendly a competitor can get if you’ve got an opportunity in which the two of you could immediately benefit.
If you’ve got an unfamiliar product or service, sometimes you can team it up with something familiar to make it more comfortable for new customers. L.A.’s Learn About Wine does just what its name suggests: educates people about all things wine-related. Their classes naturally draw vino enthusiasts, but to attract the more casual, laid-back wine drinkers, they partner their exotic tasting sessions with something familiar. Recently, for example, they hosted a tasting that paired their wines with In-N-Out burgers — a local fast-food delicacy. While not an official partnership, Learn About Wine found a way to team their service offering with something familiar for a new demographic of customers.
The Lesson: Finding a great teammate for your product or service doesn’t have to involve negotiations and formal contracts. Sometimes just finding a familiar, loved brand is enough to bring in new customers.
How do you prevent your dental assistant from frying herself with X-rays all day?
The “on” button is OUTSIDE of the exam room.
There is no way to do it wrong. You have to leave the room to turn the machine on.
Your homework: Find one thing that keeps getting screwed up and change the process so it is impossible to blow it. You’ll be amazed at how simple the fix will be.
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