Hello everyone,

I have been busy yet still keeping up with my reading now that I am back from holidays. It is just not as easy to make the time to read when I am home. This week’s review is a book “Selling The Invisible - A Field Guide to Modern Marketing” by Harry Beckwith. Now the title sounds a little dour, but I have to say that this is a very quick read and very enjoyable. It was described in the book cover as: “a treasure of hundreds of quick, practical, and easy-to-read strategies – few more than one page long. Selling the Invisible will open your eyes to new ideas. It has dozens of proven yet overlooked ideas for research, presentations, publicity, advertising and client retention”.

The reasons I found this book on service businesses and how to manage service relationships really enjoyable were…

Ø The easy writing style and large type

Ø The fun real life case studies

Ø The short length of the many subjects that Harry was trying to explain and address

Ø The clarity with which Harry made his case on the subjects he was addressing

Ø The emphasis on the book being “don’t think better, think different”. Different ways of approaching marketing challenges are presented. It is now up to the reader to use the ideas and adapt them to his or her industry. There were numerous examples and all very relatable.

Ø The solution to servicing well, is really not that hard and not something you have to be trained to do. We have just forgotten to ask people what they want and give it to them the way they need. Sometimes it is as simple as a thank you note. Harry recommends you consider how many thank you notes you wrote last year and then this year you need to double the number. See where it gets you and your business.

Selling the Invisible will help anyone that markets a product, service or career. It is on the top of my list of recommended books to read.

Enjoy and have a prosperous week.

Tricia Ryan
Principal The Marketing Chefs

Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observations rings true: urban legends, conspiracy theories and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile people with important ideas struggle to make ideas stick.

Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do you improve your chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. The brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier.

Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. Proactive, eye opening and often funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas – and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own message stick.

I liked this book because it is well organized and resonated with my common sense approach to marketing. There are six key “stickiness” principles which spell out the acronym SUCCESs (small s stands for six!), so it is easy to remember whenever you have a creative expression challenge. Here are the sticky principles…

 Principle #1 Simplicity – How do you find the essential core of an idea?
 Principle #2 Unexpectedness - How do we get people to pay attention to our ideas?
 Principle #3 Concreteness – How do we make our ideas clear?
 Principle #4 Credibility- How do we get people to believe our ideas?
 Principle #5 Emotions - How do we get people to care about our ideas?
 Principle #6 Stories – How do you get people to act on our ideas?

Like the Heath brothers taking a creative challenge and applying the rules will help you and guide you on determining if your creative expression can stick.

As a summary the SUCCESs approach helps people to remember…

 Pay attention Unexpected
 Understand & remember Concrete
 Believe and agree Credible
 Care Emotional
 Act Stories

At The Marketing Chefs we recently had a creative challenge with one of our client’s products – Zero-Tox cleaner. Now cleaning agents are a low interest category. However, consumers with children and pets are anxious to make sure that what they use is safe and won’t harm their families. We also have those consumers that are interested in being green and helping the environment. Zero-Tox is one of those cleaners that does it all – ultra safe, effective, green. We tried some public relations activities and we were very lucky to be able to piggy back on a Hertz going green as an organization editorial. Hertz was actually Zero-Tox’s client and part of the inspiration for the product being made available at retail. The Hertz employees use the product to clean all the cars you rent. There are absolutely no fumes or hazards to the skin or eyes and it is safe for them to use all day. What was interesting is that we were able to drive traffic to the Zero Tox website and consumers were reading 6-10 pages of the website information, but nobody was buying. We then tried a “get it free” campaign to get trial and interestingly enough this was even poorer in generating results for our client. Consumers told me “it was just too good to be true”.

As a creative online agency we now had a “stickiness challenge” how could we get consumers to

 Pay attention Unexpected
 Understand & remember Concrete
 Believe and agree Credible
 Care Emotional
 Act Stories

We are currently creating a viral campaign based upon the SUCCESs principles. But we also thought it would be fun to get your input.

How would you promote a great safe, green cleaner that works?

Check out the Zero Tox website, order your free sample and let me know what you think?

I look forward to your responses.

Until next week, I wish you prosperity and SUCCESs.

Tricia Ryan
Principal The Marketing Chefs

Today I am reading Little Shifts by Suzanna Beth Stinnett. It is a short inspirational book about how you can create change with every single choice, every day, all day long. The premise of the book is that life changes happen, with our without your participation. Little Shifts prevents you from feeling overwhelmed in our rapidly changing world, with advice on:

- How to make little shifts in your attitude and beliefs right away
- How to perform radical acts at any time, such as: stopping, breathing, connecting, asking and using intuition
- How to create brighter possibilities ahead by imagining your world just the way you want it
- How to carve out space for these changes in your home and you schedule

Since many of us reading this review are women and especially women running their own companies, we know that we understand that the human machine can be more productive with some innovative changes in the expectations of the work place and home lives. Since change begins by recognizing desire, this little pocket book has some great exercises to inspire you to recognize all the shifts you can create to help you from feeling so overwhelmed in our hectic everyday lives.

A very pleasant and quick book to read. You can pull it off the shelf to feel inspired.

Have a prosperous and inspiring week.

Tricia Ryan

Principal
The Marketing Chefs

Crowdsourcing Your Marketing!

Welcome to this week's book review. As many of you know, I’m passionate about marketing, online or offline. One of the ways that I keep up is constant learning. So, instead of being really clever and witty or even funny in my blog, I would like to share with you things I have picked up along the way that have inspired me and given me a moment of inspiration.

Flying home this weekend from my podcast training program in Chico, California (yes a fun and inspiring place to go to learn), I read the book “WE Are Smarter Than ME - How To Unleash The Power of Crowds In Your Business" by Barry Libert and Jon Spector and Thousands of Contributors www.wearsmarter.org. The book is fun and a very quick read. It reviews social marketing. The numbers are impressive…

 MySpace is growing at 2 million new registrants per week with over 200 million members, is well on its way to half a billion,
 There is a new blog created every second of every day (we are one);
 Over a million avatars (an image used to represent somebody in cyberspace) live in a virtual community called Second Life.

As a small business owner why might you care about social networks? Collaboration of a crowd is now creating a multimedia bandwidth and a medium of communication never thought possible before. Word of mouth and viral marketing has never been more powerful. The new potent “we” is far smarter than any singular “me”. Business people are just beginning to comprehend the consequences.

The new business model of using social networks has been coined as open sourcing or crowdsourcing. You might perceive that open sourcing of information belongs to large corporations like IBM or P&G, but I remind you of a recent experience where I was trying diligently to purchase silicon ties to truss a turkey on line. I was all over the Internet going from site to site to find a Canadian retailer. I actually ended up at a Home Shopping Internet site and found the precious cooking tool. As I was about to press the BUY button, I noticed the consumer evaluations. I quickly scanned them and found the silicon ties had performed poorly for many of the previous buyers. In a nano second, I decided not to buy. There you go, the power of crowdsourcing. Important to note these were not even people I knew and trusted.

I remind you that you must keep this example in mind, it can happen to you as any size of business owner. The power of telling ten friends has now multiplied virally. Women in particular are very good at this viral Internet crowdsourcing tool. Look at the emails we send each other for charities – Breast Cancer Think Pink and or for good luck. I know on any given day I have at least a couple in my email box.

Check out the book. It is a good read. I will follow up with more findings in the next issue.

To great marketing ideas and in friendship,

Tricia
The Marketing Chefs