Risk & Business Magazine Cooke Insurance Group Fall 2016

FEATURE STORY case-by-case basis and decide whether to work outside the “official” warranty duration. Are there areas that your competitors are ignoring that, by being more entrepreneurial, you can capitalize on? • • • • Be smarter: This sounds too simple and is almost too embarrassing to say. Since we are smaller, we can look more carefully at the business we do and make sure it makes good business sense. We don’t pick up another product just to increase the size of our line card. That’s doesn’t make good business sense for us. That’s the way we have to think—and so should you. Be personal: One thing a smaller company can do is be more personal. People buy from people. You can foster relationships that will help you sell. Part of the way we are personal is by showing our customers what markets and products are profitable. There is nothing that cements a customer relationship better than making them money, because you’ll be making money for them and for you! THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE FOR THE MARKETER IS TO GET PROSPECTS TO ACTUALLY PAY ATTENTION AND READ WHAT YOU ARE SENDING THEM. oster staff loyalty: One major F advantage guerillas have over gorillas is the ability to attract, motivate, and keep good people. Primarily, this is because guerillas can be more flexible, easier to work for, and give people a greater sense of accomplishment because what they do contributes more directly to the company’s bottom line. I have always found great power in being a smaller company and treating my people with respect and not just as numbers. At Danby Appliances, everyone is on a first-name basis, which is good for business and company spirit. Gorillas can try to do this, but it is tough for them to copy you in this area. Be opportunistic: To sum up guerilla strategy is simply to be opportunistic. Take advantage of opportunities that the gorillas cannot. There are many companies that remain profitable by being opportunistic. WHEN YOU SIT DOWN AND LOOK AT MARKETING STRATEGIES, HOW DO YOU APPROACH REACHING YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE? FALL 2016 • Grab their attention: Customers need to be woken up and shaken in order to even look at your marketing. This is why unique, outrageous, and highly creative ideas can break through. If you look at Danby Appliances’ latest marketing video, “Flipping Your Fridge,” customer attention is grabbed immediately when the viewer sees someone throwing a fridge in the air and flipping it. • Keep it short: I have noticed an interesting screening mechanism that people use—the length of the message. If the message is short, they read it. If it is long, they do not. Look at business books. Their length has dropped to about two hundred fifty pages in order to be marketable. People no longer think they get more value if a book is one thousand pages long. Instant messaging is a hot phenomenon, especially with younger people who have grown up in the age of Uber technology and information overload. And Twitter’s success is remarkable when you consider it limits its users to one hundred forty characters of text. We can all learn from Twitter; it can teach us to keep it short. I advocate that every marketer should sign up for Twitter and try sending twenty to thirty tweets. It is good training on how to get a message across in fewer words. Cut the message length and increase the impact. Less is more. I never cease to be amazed by the people who use the standard LinkedIn introduction, “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn,” with no additional comment. Adding a simple, personal message like “Jim, we met at such-and-such show…” would go a long way in making me click the “Connect” button. • | The new world demands simplicity, brevity, and ease of use. Marketers have the challenge of getting through to these newworld customers. Live by these rules: It does not matter if you have over one hundred thousand Twitter followers or over ten thousand email subscribers if no one reads what you send. The easiest (well, not really easy) way to get people to read something is to make it personal. Be a gorilla: We like to enter market areas that we can dominate and specialize in. We may not be the biggest, but in certain specific niches, we dominate. As long as we are the biggest in an area, we can act the part. We can underprice and overservice the competition forever. Anyone who enters our markets learns that it is expensive—and often impossible—to unseat us. 18 The first rule of marketing is to know your customers. Customers have changed over the past ten, twenty, and thirty ye

Risk & Business Magazine Cooke Insurance Group Fall 2016 | Page 18