Duct Tape Marketing Examples

Posted On: 2006-09-25
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Hello, welcome to another edition of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is your host John Jantsch, and my guest today is a traveling and on the road Vern Harnish. The founder of two world-renowned entrepreneurial organizations, the Young Entrepreneurs Organization, everybody knows as YEO, and the Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs, otherwise known as ACE. He's a contributing editor for Fortune Small Business, and is presently the founder and CEO of Gazelle's Inc. and the author of "Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, What you must do to increase the value of your fast growth firm." So welcome, thanks for joining me Vern.

You bet, John.

So you are in the, calling in from the cafeteria of a client, or a

We are at the cafeteria of Fortune Small Business magazine. We've got our annual student business plan contest final this afternoon, and we'll be judging the three finalist. We've got three exciting businesses, so,

You know I interviewed Tom Zatsi, the founder of Terra Cycle. Does that name ring a bell?

Yes.

He has a really neat company, I won't go into it. But he actually funded a lot of his growth of his company, or I should say start up of his company by winning business plan contests.

Yeah, there you go.

Pretty neat deal. So you talk to thousands of business owners each year, on all manners of growth topics, but I want to talk a little bit about marketing. What's been your experience on how most small businesses, medium size businesses handle the whole marketing function?

Well, you know John, they don't.

I teed that one up for you, didn't I?

Exactly. We researched that a little bit ahead of time and I've been doing this informal polling of, you know the small and mid-sized markets that I've been, you know, hanging out with. And I don't think it's been any more tan 25% of the market. A group of companies that actually has a formal marketing function that's separate from sales. I mean marketing is just a thing that's kind of lumped in the phrase, sales and marketing. And I think now that, you know, anyone who survived the bubble is won, everyone has kind of optimized about as much as they can. It is now, these next five years is the time to grab market share. And it is about marketing that is distinct from sales.

Absolutely. You were, I read on your website an article recently you wrote, key fundamentals to marketing, and you talked about what I actually call the Marketing Habit. So, if, could you touch on that a little bit, I think you mentioned that you had, what was it, Regis McKenna gave you some tips on really just a whole plan for marketing...