Touch Points

Monday Morning Memo for November 28, 2005 by Roy H. Williams

What Are You Offering?

Businesses don't fail due to reaching the wrong people.

Businesses fail when they say the wrong things.

And they say the wrong things when they believe what the public tells them.

Conduct a survey. Ask the public to describe in detail the kind of place they'd like to shop. Then build that place, exactly as described, and see if they ever show up.

Experience tells us they won't.

We'll use furniture stores as an example. People say they want a store where they can look at all the different styles of furniture, see all the different patterns and colors of fabric and grains of wood and colors of wood stain, and then have their own ‘dream furniture' made according to their choices. Today you'll find that furniture store on every corner. "And we'll even show you on a computer monitor exactly what your new sofa will look like! Want to see it in another fabric? Click this button. Another color of wood? Click this button. And we'll deliver it to your home, direct from the factory! You'll be buying factory direct!"

His real name is Jim McIngvale. They call him Mattress Mac. Twenty-five years ago he dove headlong into the furniture business with just five thousand dollars. It's all he had. This year that furniture store will do nearly 200 million dollars in a single location, placing it among the most successful stores in the world.

Jim occasionally buys a day of my time to pick my brain and bounce ideas off me. I should be paying him.

During our last visit, I asked my friend if I could share the secret of his success with you. Graciously, he allowed it: As simple as this may sound, Jim's 200 million dollar secret is immediate delivery. When people buy new furniture, they want to see it in their home immediately. "Buy it today and we'll deliver it tonight," is Jim's angle. He doesn't do special orders. "If you see it, we've got it." Remember all those people who said they wanted to pick from a large selection of fabrics and wood grains? Tell them you'll deliver their new sofa in 8 to 12 weeks. Then Jim will show them something entirely different but offer to deliver it immediately. Guess who usually wins?

What people say they would do is rarely what they will actually do. This is what makes it foolish to put too much faith in surveys. We don't know ourselves as well as we think.

Ask any real estate agent. The homes people buy are never the ones they described to the agent when they got in the car. Not even close.

Now let's talk about you. Chances are, you've been reaching the right people all along. You've just been saying the wrong things. Some ads are like waving raw meat in front of hungry dogs. Most ads are lectures, explaining to these same dogs all the joys of organic popcorn.

Do you have a tasty message to deliver to the world? Or are you expecting your ad writers to apply a thick layer of creativity to hide the fact that you have nothing to say?

Truthfully, what percentage of your ads say anything worth hearing?

Sholem Asch was right when he said, "Writing comes more easily if you have something to say." But Morris Hite said it brazenly, "If you have a good selling idea, your secretary can write your ad for you."

We're here if you need us.

Roy H. Williams

PS - Look to the far left of this memo and you'll see this week's featured product. Selling Customers Their Way is a wonderful DVD featuring my partner, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Wizard Academy board member Dr. Richard Grant, a consulting psychologist. If you read the product description at WizardAcademyPress.com, be sure to download a sample. It's fun viewing.

MMM for November 21, 2005

Do You Need A Miracle?

Finances. Relationships. Health... the tall monsters we face in life's dark ocean when we awaken underwater, alone in the night, not knowing what to do.

Ever been there?

People respond to deep crisis in different ways. There are:

MMM for Monday November 14, 2005 by Roy H. Williams

What Women Want

I did a bad, bad thing.

Last week's memo ended too abruptly. "Yes, selling to men can be very easy. But how does one sell to women? Ah. That is a different question. – Roy H. Williams" The phrase, "sell to women?" was hyperlinked to additional information. Judging from the record number who clicked that link, What Women Really Want remains one of the great, unsolved mysteries of man.

The hyperlinked phrase, of course, took you to the course description for Michele Miller's class on marketing to women. Those who clicked her free, streaming video found the answer. But for rest of you, my cliffhanging question remains unanswered.

Allow me to rectify...

MMM from Roy H. Willaims

How to Buy Word of Mouth

The price of making a powerful statement is cheap compared to the cost of ads that don't work. So make a statement that counts. This is the best advice I can give you.

I'm not talking about making a grand and sweeping claim, such as, "Lowest prices anywhere. We won't be undersold." No one believes hype anymore. I'm talking about a statement that is bona fide, no loopholes, easy to experience. And it only takes one such statement to put a business over the top. This is why you should designate a percentage of your ad budget to purchase word-of-mouth advertising.

Word-of-mouth is credible because ....

MMM for July 18, 2005 by Roy H. Williams

Perceptual Reality

Earth's population reached 1 billion persons in 1804, 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in ‘59, 4 billion in ‘74 and 5 billion in late ‘86. And on October 12th, 1999, Earth's population surpassed 6 billion.

The number of passengers on Spaceship Earth has doubled (from 3 billion – 1959, to 6 billion – 1999,) in 40 short years. But we're not discussing population growth today, I'm just opening your eyes to perceptual reality.

The cognoscenti of Magical Worlds will remember a brief discussion of perceptual reality at the beginning of class. "Each of you will sit in this room for 3 days and hear the same information presented in precisely the same way. But you'll leave here having had an entirely different experience from the persons on your left and your right. You will connect different dots, have different epiphanies, make different associations. Objective reality will be the same for each of you. But your perceptual realities will be yours alone."

There are 525,948.766 minutes in a year. This means that each minute, the 6 billion of us experience a collective 11,408 years of perceptual reality. And each day we live a collective 16,427,455 years.

Given that we lived nearly sixteen and a half million years yesterday, it seems like one of us would've figured out how to end poverty, crime and war, doesn't it? (Personally, I was really busy, so I was counting on you.)

Today's illustration is an image of the famous mime, Marcel Marceau, superimposed over a photo of Earth with snapshots of women and men on its surface. To the right is the cover of Paul Finley's awesome 14 Windows guitar CD.

You, reader, saw the same image as 30,000 other subscribers, but your perception was yours alone. You may have been confused by the image, amused by it, intrigued by it, or mildly or strongly disturbed by it. Perhaps you even saw a symbolic statement being made. I did not intend one.

Perceptual reality is yours alone.

Every door of opportunity begins as a window in your mind.

Look through that window of imagination and glimpse a world that could be, someday. Keep looking… Be patient… And watch it grow into a door of Opportunity through which you might pass into an entirely different future.

Opportunity never knocks. But it hangs thick in the air all around you. You breathe it unthinking, and dissipate it with your sighs.

Opportunity never knocks. It appears, flickering, like faulty neon at a nondescript fork in the road.

Opportunity never knocks. It whispers, a tickle in your distracted mind.

So what are you going to do? Will you sleep, unaware of the miracles that need your assistance, or will you open your eyes, look through that window, and begin doing what only you can do?

Roy H. Williams

The 2005 Wizard Academy Reunion and Open House will be Saturday, October 15 and you are definitely invited. Our day together will begin at 2:00PM, (no lunch will be provided. But dinner is a different thing. Yes, dinner will be unforgettable. And we've got stuff planned that will take us to at least 10:00 or 11:00PM.) Meet new friends and old and have the time of your life wandering the emerging campus. Three large buildings will be completely finished by then, and Engelbrecht House (the student mansion) should have its foundation laid. Details in the next couple of weeks.

Remember The Little Tree, the Flash-animated video? Well, Peter Nevland and That Bald Guy have teamed up to create another one called Willy the Walrus. Take a look.

6,000,000,000 (persons in the world) divided by 525,948.766 (minutes in a year) = 11,407.9553 years of perceptual reality experienced each minute, x 1,440 (minutes in a day) = 16,427,455.6 (years of perceptual reality in a day.)

MMM for Monday April 18, 2005 by Roy H. Williams

Power of the Buzz
Bryan and Jeff Eisenberg have a New Book

People have said for decades, "Word-of-mouth is the best kind of advertising. That's the best kind: word-of-mouth." You hear this so often when you sell advertising that my friend Bob Lepine used to joke about opening The Word of Mouth Advertising Agency. He said he was going to hire people to sit at bus stops and ride the elevators in tall buildings and say to people, "Have you tried that new restaurant over on Fifth Street? It's GREAT!" The funniest part of Bob's idea is that it probably would've actually worked.

The power of the buzz – word-of-mouth advertising – lies in its credibility. But the only way to create buzz is to rock a person's world so hard that they can't help but talk about it to their friends.

I'm going to try to do that today.

Ray Bard of Bard Press, the publisher of my bestselling Wizard of Ads trilogy, looked at the new hardback book about to be released by Wizard Academy Press and wrote me an email. (I was walking out the door to meet Ray for lunch when a boxful of advance copies arrived from the printer. On impulse, I grabbed one for Ray.) These comments by email were completely unsolicited:

Roy

Great to see you and catch up yesterday. And, thanks for the new Wizard Academy Press book. I usually refrain from providing comments about books after they're published (I've made enough mistakes myself over the years) but there is one issue that may deserve attention.

When I got home last night I gave the book a quick look. It felt good in the hand and the inside contents looked good. Although the title sounded like a political book and provided no information about the content, I know that it can get by as it is. The other, more difficult issue, is the price. When I first saw the $13.95 I thought it was a mistake but noticed it was printed in two places. The last time 300 page hard cover business books sold for $13.95 was probably 30 years ago. The retail price is a statement of what you think the value of the book is. When most similar business books are selling for twice as much today, you can see the message this sends.

If the publisher is pursing a strong merchandising strategy with lots of face out retail space I recommend pushing the retail into the "value" category. Unless you have a new distribution effort, I would not recommend it for this book. And, the $13.95 is way beyond "value" pricing.

For what my opinion is worth, I would have priced it at $30. and sold it at $20 for special customers. I think you can see the difference in psychology.

Again, I regret bringing this up now, but I know the book will be used in the company's marketing efforts. And, as it is, the price sends just the opposite message you want.

Ray

Ray Bard is America's most successful publisher of business books. He is responsible for putting two of my books on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and one on the New York Times list, so I listen carefully to what Ray says.

He's right. Thirteen ninety-five is way too cheap for a 326 page hardback containing this kind of detailed information about how to make online marketing actually work. These pages are chock full of little-known techniques for improving online marketing results. More than a dozen Fortune 500 companies have paid the authors huge amounts of money to learn this stuff. That's why our plan all along was to price the second printing at 25.95. But this first printing exists only to create a buzz. That's why we're giving you 2 additional copies for each one you buy at just $13.95. We know you'll give them to friends. We know your friends will be rocked. We know your friends will talk about it to their friends. It's all about the buzz and this book contains some fabulous honey. By the way, shipping is free if you live in the US, so you'll have a grand total of only 4.65 per book in each of your 3 hardback copies.

Wizard Academy Press is gambling that the information contained in this book will give you a heady buzz and be worth mentioning to your friends.

I'll let you know in a few weeks how the experiment turns out. In the meantime, why not get 3 copies headed your way?

Roy H. Williams

PS – If the name Bob Lepine sounded familiar, it's because he's been co-hosting a radio talk show for the past 12 years heard in cities across America. Bob and I worked together in Tulsa a quarter-century ago. I think often of all he taught me.

PPS - I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE SAY "I TOLD YOU SO," BUT… when I told you in early 2004 that my research on society's pendulum indicated that Harley Davidson would soon become an embarassing icon of yesterday's values, very few people took me seriously. After all, Harley was among America's most powerful brands at the time. When I put it in print November 1, 2004, I got the same response. Did you read the news in the Milwaukee Journal (Harley's home town) last week? "The wheels came off Harley-Davidson Inc. on Wednesday when the company's shares posted their biggest drop in 14 years, knocking almost $3 billion from their stock market value." Doug Kass of Seabreeze Partners added, "This is no longer a growth company." Tony Gikas, an analyst with Piper Jaffray Co. echoed; "This is the first crack in the eggshell."

Your Life is a Journey, but where is it taking you?

Roy H. Williams' MMM for Monday February 7, 2005

You had friends and laughter, adventure and romance. Remember the halcyon days of your youth? But then the friends went away, the laughter faded, the adventure ended and the romance was over.

It was time to go to work.

Do you ever feel like you're wearing ankle irons, condemned to row forever with the other galley slaves in the dim life below ship's deck? "I too have had my dreams: ay, known indeed the crowded visions of a fiery youth which haunt me still." - Oscar Wilde

One of the happy accidents of Wizard Academy...