Linda's Marketing Leverage Blog

How the Book Began

Now that my Handbook, Marketing Your Career: Positioning, Packaging and Promoting Yourself for Success has been published and is available, I thought I'd reflect on the process I went through to conceive and deliver this project.

Birth seems to be an appropriate metaphor, because there really is a conception, gestation and then delivery process. Unlike having a child, though, this process isn't guaranteed to be over in 9 months. Sometimes it can take a whole lot longer to get from Point A to Point B, and sometimes, just as in real life, there are writing efforts that don't quite make it the whole way through the process.

In my case, there was about a two year process from when I decided I would write a full book to when I finally said, we're not getting anywhere--let's go at this another way. Last spring, after a discussion with my mentor Alan Weiss, I decided to create a series of shorter works instead.

The idea would be to take some of the key concepts in my Leverage2Market Model and create shorter booklets (which evolved into handbooks) as a first step in creating published works. The initial topic was a natural one: Take the material that had been so well received in my articles and workshops on Marketing Product YOU and evolve it into a guide to help professionals better market the ultimate product offering, themselves. From that point, the path to the final product was a bit circuitous and included a long discussion about whether this material was better suited to marketers in particular or professionals in general. (Arguments on both sides were compelling--I finally decided to be more inclusive and talk more generally to a broad professional audience.)

I also learned that writing a book is only a small subset of what's required to get a book published. The publishing process in itself has been an incredible learning experience. Look for more posts on this topic in the coming weeks.

What's interesting to me is that just like with a real life child, people tell me the book looks great and ask when I'm going to do the next one. Right now we're just recovering from the first one. Stay tuned

Those Pesky Little Fuel Surcharges

Very high on my list of Pet Peeves of how to irritate a customer: Add a surcharge to your bill for oil, gas, delivery, etc. because the price of fuel has gone up.

Excuse me, but when oil is $100 a barrel, it impacts everyone. So not only has your cost gone up, but so have the costs of your customers and the people who work for you. Yet most of us don't go around adding "fuel surcharges" to our invoices.

The cost of delivering your product is part of your cost of doing business. If you've priced your product appropriately, you shouldn't have to tack on these irritating little surcharges.

Besides, when was the last time a company gave you a fuel credit because the price of fuel went down?  Instead, these charges become a permanent part of the invoices and another way for companies to generate revenue.

If you're going to charge me for these types of things, at least have the courtesy to credit me for all the things I do that help save you money (starting with the fact that it costs less to keep and grow an existing customer than to have to go out and market to get new business).

Or deep six the surcharges.

They Still Just Don't Get It: Arrowhead Water

Last year Arrowhead Water informed me that they were making my home water deliveries less frequent to accommodate their needs, not mine. They would also give me more water bottles to make sure I was covered for the longer duration, which, to me, looked like a way to push more product to the customer.

This month an insert in my bill tells me that starting immediately they have a minimum purchase requirement for deliveries. So now, not only are deliveries less often, but I'm also required to buy more. Is this supposed to be improved customer service?

Perhaps someone should tell Arrowhead (and their corporate parent Nestle) that they ought to be working harder to convince me to buy their products--not making it more difficult. Today's customers know they have a myriad of options to choose from--including no longer buying bottled water but using tap water instead to be environmentally conscious. So shouldn't suppliers be taking care of *me* the customer, instead of *them* the supplier?

This strategy is pretty washed up to me.

Too Darn Quiet on This Here Blog

Wow! It's been a long time since there've been any postings on this blog. Too darn quiet. Have I been MIA? Well, not entirely...

Here's what I've been up to lately...

• Added a new course, Branding Strategies, to my offerings at San Francisco State's Integrated Marketing Program.
• Presented workshops for the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association and ProMatch Santa Clara.
• Helped drive the Marketing Operations Partner benchmark study, Journey to Marketing Operations Maturity
• Supported a fascinating company called ScoutLabs in the Astia Entrepreneur Venture Conference (more about them to come soon!)
• Created a three part feature on Taking Control of Your Marketing Career that has been appearing on the Marketing Crossing website starting in October.
• Wrote and published my first book, Marketing Your Career: Positioning, Packaging, and Promoting Yourself for Success, which will be released later this month and is available for purchase now online through Woodside Business Press

And of course supported a number of great clients with consulting  project and speaking presentations.

Now that the book is in production, look for more activity back here on the blog.

The Real Problem w/Senator Craig

It's been hard to miss the ongoing saga of Idaho senator Larry Craig whose recent arrest and guilty plea for lewd behavior in an airport restroom has been a top news story for the last week or so. After being  nearly ex-communicated from the Republican party, last weekend Craig announced his resignation from the US Senate.

Or did he? Today's headline is that Craig may "reconsider" his resignation, depending on the outcome of his "reconsideration" of his guilty plea.

Personally, I don't care whether Craig is straight, gay, bisexual or something in between--that's his business. What bothers me most about this is that the man seems to not have a backbone: he can't make a decision and stick with it.

First he pleads guilty to the bathroom charge. Then after this is publicized, he reconsiders his decision. Then he decides to resign his Senate seat. But a few days later, he reconsiders his decision.

We're not talking about choosing paint for your living room, or which car you want to drive. The decisions Craig has made in the last several months are serious ones. One does not plead guilty to a crime without considering the implications thereof. He had the right to an attorney and appears to have not availed himself of one before submitting his pleas. Before resigning from an elected position, one should consider that it's unlikely they can simply "unresign" later. If the man can't understand the implications and repercussions of making a decision and living with it, then in my book, he should also not be making decisions about topics that impact all of us such as the war in Iraq, government funding or other key issues that may come before Congress.

I don't understand why we as a society, and Republicans in particular, are so obsessed by people's individual sex lives. However, as a long-time member of that party and an elected official representing that party in national office, Craig should have understood how behavior like this would impact his standing with his colleagues and his constituents. He is responsible for his own actions and the consequences thereof.  If he was innocent, he should have not pleaded guilty. If he didn't believe this should impact his ability to serve his constituents, he should not have resigned.

If he had a backbone, he would make a decision and stand by it.

Beyond the Harry Hysteria

Now that the midnight release of the final Harry Potter book has come and gone, it's interesting to look at what just happened from a marketing perspective.

The build-up to the launch of this last book started almost from the release of book 6, when JK Rowling confirmed #7 would be the final chapter. As the date got closer and closer, the frenzy reached an almost feverish pitch. Book stores scheduled all night Potter Parties and fans of all ages reserved their books for immediate midnight or next morning purchase.

Then we got the inevitable leaks, early releases, threats of lawsuits, etc. What's fascinating to me is how much this whole phenomenon fed into the marketing machine that has grown up around this craze. Front page stories focused on whether the excerpts posted on the website were in fact real or incorrect versions. The publisher threatened not only those who posted the book early but websites, publishers, stores, etc. who were in any way involved in premature release of the book.

Not that the Harry Potter mania has been a bad thing. The release party at independent bookseller Keplers in Menlo Park took up a full city block and had fans of all ages dressed to the nines as Potter characters, clearly having fun. Anything that gets people in general and kids in particular excited about reading books is a good thing in *my* book.

The big question was whether Harry lives or dies at the end of the final book. Here's the interesting part. Now that the release has come and gone so has that big question. Most of the mainstream sites, papers, etc. I've seen have *NOT* posted the book's ending now that it's publicly available. Those that have reviewed the book have done so in a way that does not give away the conclusion.

So the big frenzy about the big ending was only important as long as it was a mystery. Now that millions of copies of the book are available it's no longer news. But until then, it was a great story that ensured there was virtually no one in the free world who didn't know about the book's release Fri at midnight. It probably sold thousands and thousands of additional books. In other words, the threatened early release was the best marketing publisher Scholastic could have asked for.

The new mystery is how do book publishers, sellers and marketers leverage all that hype and hoopla in the future? The really big question is whether the passion around reading that developed as a result of the Harry Potter series continues or dies with The Deathly Hallows. Stay tuned for the next chapter...

What to do w/all those old light bulbs?

I opened a storage cabinet in my garage recently and realized I had a dilemma.

Now that I have swapped just about all of the incandescent light bulbs in my home for compact flourescents, I now have a box full of slightly used but still functional Thomas Edison-type 60 and 100 Watt bulbs. The question is what should I do with these?

If I throw them out, I'm taking something that's useful and putting it in a landfill unnecessarily too soon.
If I give them to someone else, I'm adding to the problem of too many incandescents using too much energy and global warming.
If I donate them (e.g., to Goodwill), I'm perhaps helping someone who couldn't afford a CF. Yet if $ is tight, wouldn't it be better to get them CFs to start with that last longer and don't contribute to our global warming crisis?

None of these look like great solutions. So there they sit, a box full of working light bulbs. Potentially useful, potentially harmful. But not bothering anyone as they gather dust on the shelf...

The End of Online Greeting Cards?

Maybe you thought those animated, singing/dancing e-greeting cards were cute. Maybe you thought they were silly or a total waste of time. Whether you liked them or not, it looks like they may become the victim of the latest phishing/spam scheme.

In addition to cheap mortgages, great deals on Viagra/Cialis and Canadian prescription drugs, and banks I've never heard of needing me to confirm my account information with them, the latest spam to fill my junk folder is fake egreeting cards. Some of these purport to be from American Greetings or Hallmark, just like all the bank emails that are supposedly from Bank of America or First Third Bank (which has to be the strangest name for a bank I've ever heard--are you really First or Third? Make up your mind). Some of them wanted to offer me 4th of July greetings. All of them were fake.

The result: my spam filter is being trained to spot any and all egreeting card messages, collect them and trash them. Which means any legitimate egreetings--for birthdays, holidays, a thank you, or just saying hi--will also be trashed. Unless someone in the legitimate egreeting card business finds a good, dependable way to stand out from the junk.

Stay tuned to see what happens. Just don't wait for me to send you an online card with an update...

From Yucky to Yummy: A great marketing tool

Stopping in to Walgreens to pick up a prescription today, I noticed something new on the counter...the Yucky Medicine wheel. This is one of those devices that you turn to find out information about each of probably 50 or more medications listed on the outside of the wheel. In this case, as you turn the wheel, it displays the Yuckiness Factor for each liquid medication in terms of taste.

The three choices in taste ratings (complete with emoticon-type icons) are:

• Yucky tasting
• More yucky
• Most yuckiest

For each medication, there is a second round of displays that indicates what additional flavorings are available to be added to the medication to make it more palatable (i.e., some are available in cherry and lemon, others in strawberry or pineapple, etc.).

Now we all know that there is no such thing as a good tasting liquid medicine--blechh! The folks @ Walgreens and the flavoring company have embraced this fact and turned it into a marketing tool. Instead of official-sounding, rational taste rankings like mild or moderately offensive, they go right to yucky and more yucky. Who can argue with that?

The goal is to convince patients and their parents to spend a few dollars extra to have a pleasant tasting flavoring added to their liquid medicine. (Medicinal flavorings are usually not covered by medical insurance, but paid for out of pocket.) What's a couple of dollars when you face the choice of feeding your child 10 days of most yuckiest medicine, three times a day?

BTW, the pharmacist told me that many adults take liquid medicines and they too try to avoid the yucky factor. So this marketing tactic works for adults as well as kids.

Great marketing, Walgreens. Makes you almost want to raise a medicine  stopper and say cheers! Well, ALMOST.

Let's Blame EVERYONE Else, Shall We?

The death of St. Louis Cardinals Pitcher Josh Hancock in an alcohol-related traffic accident last month really was a tragedy. But the lawsuits filed by his family afterwards have taken this beyond the ridiculous to the absurd.

Yesterday it was reported in SI.Com that Hancock's father, on behalf of Hancock's estate, has chosen to sue the restaurant/bar that continued to serve Hancock alcohol for over 3.5 hours. OK, that seems somewhat understandable--bars have a legal responsibility to not serve inebriated patrons.

But that's only the beginning. The lawsuit also names the towing company whose flatbed truck Hancock plowed into, the tow truck driver, and the poor hapless motorist who was unlucky enough to be working with the tow truck, after having stalled out because he was cut off by another vehicle.

This is IN SPITE of the fact that Hancock's blood alcohol was twice the legal limit, he was speeding, he was using a cell phone during the accident,  he was not wearing a seatbelt, and marijuana was found in the vehicle.

I'm sort of surprised the lawsuit didn't include cell phone manufacturers, the transportation department for the state of Missouri  for building such a poorly designed freeway, and perhaps the Columbian drug cartel for their role in providing illegal recreational drugs. But I'm sure all these parties--and more--can be added later. (And what about the estate of Abner Doubleday for inventing baseball, without which none of this would have happened?)

It's one thing to turn to the justice system for relief when one has been wronged, but in this case it appears that the one individual who was at fault, Hancock, suffered the ultimate consequence for a series of really bad judgments. It's a free country and adults should take responsibility for their actions. Nowhere has it been reported that someone put a gun to Hancock's head and forced him to consume large amounts of alcohol, drive, speed, be distracted and use illicit drugs--all without buckling his seat belt.

Rather than blame everyone else, when something goes wrong, let's put the blame where it belongs--with the person whose actions led to the series of events in question. Seems pretty sensible to me.