Eat Your Way To Marketing Success!

"A Marketing Feast" e-book provides a different approach to sales and marketing. The authors, Tim Thompson (U.S.) and Cathrine Garnell (U.K.) figured that sales are the food of success. So they wrote the e-book to teach people creative marketing and sales thinking using food - with real food recipes - as a formula.

They met on-line and discussed their individual marketing efforts – Garnell writes children's books and Thompson produces software products. They quickly discovered that the unique and creative marketing approach often wins the day. Thinking creatively themselves, they realized that food recipes were an excellent parallel and provided a How-To methodology rather than daunting and intimidating charts, formulae and information.

As Garnell explains: "You have to be creative in getting people interested, and most marketing books are focused on methods, but not creativity. For example, in marketing my children's book: 'Basil, the Bionic Cat', I put a big sign on the home page of my Web site saying: DO NOT ENTER! Page views and customers increased rapidly. I never read about that trick anywhere. Yet it worked because it piqued interest."

Thinking 'outside the box' is the theme, and the e-book starts readers off with a food recipe in the first chapter to prove the point. It discusses the pros and cons of using a marketing firm vs. doing creative marketing yourself.

Readers are instructed to make a popular rice and vermicelli side dish using a commonly available grocery product out of the box. By contrast, they provide a recipe for making the same dish 'from scratch'. They ask readers to prepare both dishes and then invite friends to try them and see which is more appealing. You can guess the results of that experiment. And that's the point.

Adds Thompson: "I hired a firm to get me top ranking in search engines. They were slow and I was frustrated. So I got creative, dug around and learned about SE ranking. I adapted it to my Web pages and wound up out ranking the same pages that the marketing firm was trying to rank! I got number one listings where the best they could do was number three or five. All it took was creativity, and had I known, I could have saved a LOT of money."

The e-book goes further to teach readers to think like customers, not producers and suppliers. A common mistake that marketers make is that somehow, people already know about their product or service because it is part of a popular product line, such as a cell phone. But there is a difference between a cell phone and YOUR cell phone.

To illustrate this, one chapter sends readers on a shopping trip to buy a music CD – a symphony by a very well known composer. The trick is that the symphony is not well known. Their goal is to find and buy it. Obviously, they find the composer easily enough, but the symphony is a different matter. From this process, readers learn what their customers are up against finding them, so they become creative in making themselves and their products much more visible.

The book also teaches readers that unorthodox combinations can often lead to success. In one food recipe, readers are taught to marinate steak in cranberry juice. Cranberries are normally associated with turkey. However, the taste results of their recipe are surprisingly delicious. So too, they suggest, an unorthodox combination of marketing ingredients may make just the "dish" that delights customers and brings them back.

And that's the point.


Cooking Up Customers – A Marketing Feast, is available on-line at: http://www.clydesight.com/CUCMS

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ClydeSight Productions are creators of inspiring and entertaining multimedia, music e-books and websites.