Herman School of Business
"The Enemy is Obscurity"...
The real entire quote is from Seth Godin when he spoke about giving away one of his books on the Internet. While some people believed putting one of his books on line for free was availing himself of those who would steal property without paying for it, Seth commented, “The enemy is not piracy – the enemy is obscurity.”
500 books are published per day, and for 85% of them the marketing budget is less than $2,500.00. People looking for books to read are never even exposed to 90% of the ones in print. Hence, obscurity.
Is your small business obscure?
Do customers who want what you sell, or need what you do, or crave what you create even know you are there?
The lesson you can learn from the world of selling books is that giving away some of your product, your service, or your knowledge is necessary to break out of obscurity. For one company I sent people out on street corners in the city where we had locations and they just handed out coffee mugs with our logo to workers heading into the office. That was our target customer. Office workers needed our service, and they all had a favorite coffee mug on their desk at work…and even if they just filled ours with pens and pencils…at least it sat there staring at the worker with our name prominently displayed as a permanent reminder and we gave it to that worker for free.
When I started one service business and wanted to meet owners in financial trouble I knew they didn’t have money to fly me in to speak with them…so I decided right from the start that I would pay my own way and charge nothing for that first meeting. Think about this a minute. It was an average of eight hundred dollars per trip to buy a ticket back then and rent a car to drive to the outskirts of somewhere in America to meet a guy going down the tubes. And then understand that you would only work with one third of every owner you met, so sixteen hundred dollars went down the drain for nothing. But, was it nothing? Or did I learn something about another business that would help me at another meeting later? Well, over the years many partners tried to tell me we were crazy for flying around for free giving away valuable time and getting nothing.
What were they talking about? I spent about forty thousand dollars a year chasing deals and billed out over five hundred thousand dollars per year in fees, and most years it went over a million dollars a year in fees, topping out at two million one year. You see, once I wasn’t obscure anymore people started calling me. And for those trips to sign up a deal all of those free trips were well taken care of weren’t they.
If your business is just starting out, or it is getting stale why don’t you try giving some of what you do away…and find a new audience or a new set of customers in the process. Fight obscurity.
- Posted: 24 March 2008
- Comments: 0
- Category: Starting a business
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