How to Break Out Your Business

Posted On: 2007-02-12Length:

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You've tuned in to another installment of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Always chock full of simple, effective and affordable small business marketing tips, tactics, and strategies. And now here's your host, America's most practical small business marketing expert, John Jantsch.

Hello, welcome to another edition of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is your host, John Jantsch, and my guest today is Sam Horn, she is a speaker and consultant and author of the recently released POP! standout in any crowd, and the creator of the POP process where she helps folks have create innovative ways to craft one-of-a- kind titles, slogans, and brands. So welcome.

Why thank you John, I've been looking forward to sharing some ideas with your clients and colleagues.

Well, first off, let's, anytime that we've used a term that you've coined, I always like to say, ok, what is POP? What does that stand for?

Good question. Well, POP is a process of 25 ways that we can break out instead of blend in. I know that many of the listeners are small business owners, entrepreneurs, and after a while we all start looking alike. So this is how we can come up with purposeful, original, pithy messages that help us stand out from the crowd instead of get lost in the crowd.

So, do you mind taking a second, so what does purposeful mean, in terms of communication?

That's a great question. It's, well, let's talk about the Super Bowl, which was recently. Here's a wonderful example of like, you can watch a commercial for which they paid over a million dollars.

Two and a half.

There you go. For 30 seconds, right?

That's right. I bought a couple of them, that's why I know.

Ok, there you go. Well you know, if it makes you laugh, great. Does it drive you to the website, does it make you buy the product? See, our goal as the ad genius Bill Burnbock said, dullness will not sell your product. Neither will irrelevant brilliance. See, everything we do has to meet an objective because we don't have time or money to spend on things that don't pay off in high ROA white. So, everything's got to pay off.

And I talk about my definition of marketing. I've boiled it down after working with small business owners for 20 years is, is getting somebody who has a need to know, like and trust you.

There you go.

And I think that's a lot of what you're talking about. The goal of this POP, some of it is to get awareness, but also to have that awareness be meaningful enough that I think I want to develop a relationship and begin to trust you.

That's exactly right.

Can you give some example that you've, I mean I know they're everywhere, in fact you even put out an occasional hall of fame, people using it, so give me a couple great examples that might help people understand.

Well, one of my favorite examples is something that we all face, is that what do we do when we're one of many. How can we be one of a kind? Well, a restaurant was faced with this problem. It had a happy hour and no one was coming. Well, why? Well because 50 restaurants in a one-mile radius all have happy hours, so they were one of many. So the enterprising owner happened to notice that one of the loyal customers brought his dog and tied up the dog at the shop outside when he came in for a...