Geoff Dillon - Marketing, PR, Strategy Blog

Repackaging Common Sense for Fun and Profit

There’s money to be made in repackaging common sense and reselling it to the market as wisdom. 

This happens all the time, everyday. For example, a training course is often a repackaging of some common sense information about a topic, which is fed back to participants in the form of a “model” or “approach” to help the topic make sense. But within the model, there’s no single component that is anything but common sense. 

I should be clear that I am not being negative here. Packaging information up so that it can be delivered to people in a format that they will welcome, understand, and even seek out is hugely valuable.

Example - one of the most influential business books of our time could be viewed through this lens. Stephen Covey’s 7 habits series focuses on key areas for self improvement. As a reminder, the 7 habits are:

-    Be Proactive

-    Begin with the End in Mind

-    Put First Things First

-    Think Win-Win

-    Seek First to Understand, then to be understood

-    Synergize

-    Sharpening the Saw

When you look at the concepts presented above in isolation, don’t you think you could have come up with some of these over a coffee? Being proactive, and beginning with a defined goal in mind certainly seem like very common sense tips for making yourself a more effective person. Yet, millions upon millions of people bought the book, making Covey a recognized expert in his field. 

It’s the packaging that makes it work. It’s the relationship between the 7 habits, and Covey’s way of delivering them that create the package that people buy into. When it’s packaged this way, it makes sense to people and gives them a framework to work within, even if there are really no components within the framework that are lightning bolts of insight. 

This has implications for how you approach communicating. It’s not always about inventing a new message. Many times, it’s about making sense of the world around you and giving people a new way to look at what they already know. 

Green Marketing Fatigue

Green Marketing is still in its infancy, and yet we’re already seeing headlines citing “green marketing fatigue” among consumers.

The allure of green marketing has proven so powerful that too many companies are making dubious claims about their environmental commitment – and the entire green marketing movement is now met with considerable skepticism as a result.

So what’s a company to do?

In my view there are two green marketing avenues available to marketers:

• The "corporate initiative approach", which usually sees a company promoting the fact that they use 5% less paper at head office or have reduced air conditioning usage

• The "customer experience approach", which enables clients to participate in some way in reducing materials, recycling packaging, and so on

The customer approach is by far the more effective of the two, and much less likely to be viewed suspiciously by your customers. Green marketing initiatives that your customers actually participate in combine a positive customer experience with your green marketing efforts, making both feel more genuine at the end of the day.

For example, would you rather hear that the grocery store you shop at has reduced their lighting by 10% to conserve energy, or that you can now choose recycled paper bags instead of plastic?

Would you rather hear that Toyota has cut emissions from their factories by 10% on average, or that they are offering special lease rates on their most fuel efficient cars to make them even more affordable?

In both cases, the latter option allows customers to make a deliberate decision to do something that’s better for the environment, be it choosing a reusable shopping bag or a more fuel efficient car. The result is a more genuine "green" experience.

Enabling clients to do something green through your company is far more effective than doing something at head office and then telling the world you did it.

Breaking the Chocolate Almond Cycle

Why is it that almost every community organization trying to raise money resorts to going to door to door selling overpriced chocolate covered almonds?

 

It’s an epidemic in my neighbourhood.

 

Sure, I guess you’ll hit a certain number of homes where the person at the door just happens to have a craving, and so they’ll pay the $5 to get a box knowing that the gross overpayment is going (in part) to a helpful organization in the community. Others will buy out of the goodness of their hearts.

 

But really - there’s got to be a better way to do this for all parties.

 

How about selling services where 100% of the money goes to charity, as opposed to only a portion of the price when you are selling a product?

 

How about $15 to cut my lawn this week, or $10 to Windex all of my ground floor windows (takes 10 minutes…but how often do most homeowners do this?)

 

How about raking the leaves, or shoveling the snow?

 

I’d pay for it. Many homeowners would, because it gives them some of their time back and the money goes to a good cause. You can probably come up with 5 other odd jobs that people just don’t have time for, but need to get done. (weeding the lawn, for example)

 

I bet you’d net more funds for your charity in the end, and people might actually look forward to your next visit. 

The Cost of Imperfection

How much did it cost you today because you were imperfect?

You know that your website/blog/product/packaging/etc. isn’t perfect. There are a few things you would like to do to make it better.

But, there are also competing priorities, and you can’t do everything, so you learn to live with those little imperfections while dealing with bigger, more pressing issues.

Have you ever put anything back on the shelf in the grocery store because it wasn’t perfect?

You know, you pick up a can of soup, but you realize the back half of the label is ripped off, or the can is dented…so you put it back on the shelf and grab another. If it’s the last one, you might forget about buying soup altogether, or perhaps choose a similar product from another brand that isn’t dented.

So...when you’re the consumer, a small imperfection can lead you to abandon a planned purchase.

But...when you’re the marketer, you live with imperfection because you have other pressing issues to deal with.

But what's more pressing than sales?