Tag: competition
Top-of-Mind Awareness
Before we begin, you must understand the concept that underlies this book. In today's society, I believe we have experienced two major shifts that have almost completely revolutionized the entire business landscape.
The first and most important one is competition.
Thou Shall Not Copy
If there’s one problem in all advertising and marketing, it is the sheer fact that there is too much competition out there. Everything just seems to look like everything else. If one copies another company let alone another company’s promotion, it only serves as a reminder of one’s competition!
You don’t want to remind your prospects about your competition, do you?
Thou Shall Appoint Thyself
A recently understood segment of marketing is the immense power behind the product category. Often, many businesses build their entire marketing strategy around a particular brand and its better qualities within a currently known product category, only to have it all go down the drain in the end.
Remember the “New Coke”? In the 80’s, Pepsi conducted taste tests called “The Pepsi Challenge.” Coke, on the sidelines, also heard from their own research that a newer, better tasting brand would beat Pepsi.
Thou Shall Make The Ordinary Extraordinary
So, if you’re following the commandments, you should now have a unique name, possibly a tagline, and established yourself as the first or leader in your unique category. What about the service or product you offer? Do you offer an extraordinary product or service, or do you offer an ordinary one?
Even if the service you provide is customary, traditional, and probably offered by your competition, you should make it appear unique just as well.
Thou Shall Take it Step by Step
A mistake businesspeople often make is when they try to sell their company directly in every communication they produce. (I’m referring to the idea that they try to sell their company as being merely open for business, also called “institutional advertising,” and not direct marketing, which is different.)
Institutional advertising (or what I call “blind branding”) will draw up immediate clients. When advertising, they spend hoards of cash on repeated, slick and entertaining ads. When marketing to people for the first time, they blab on until the cows come home. When sending out information, they send beautifully designed packages that make shipping crates look like a joke!
Cautions and Observations
Many people will scoff at the idea that there is an exact science of getting rich. Holding the impression that the supply of wealth is limited, they will insist that social and governmental institutions must be changed before even any considerable number of people can acquire a competence.
But this is not true.
It is true that existing governments keep the masses in poverty, but this is because the masses do not think and act in the certain way.
Increasing Life
You must get rid of the last vestige of the old idea that there is a deity whose will it is that you should be poor or whose purposes may be served by keeping you in poverty.
The intelligent substance which is all, and in all, and which lives in all and lives in you, is a consciously living substance. Being a consciously living substance, it must have the nature and inherent desire of every living intelligence for increase of life. Every living thing must continually seek for the enlargement of its life, because life, in the mere act of living, must increase itself.
