The July meeting of the GKIC London Chapter took place on 21 July, 2015 at our current home of “The Happenstance” on Ludgate Hill.
David White took the first session titled…
“3 Ways To Avoid Becoming A Commodity And Gaining Price Elasticity”.
Being seen as offering a commodity product or service is…BAD! That’s mainly because in that situation you lack pricing power and have to accept the prevailing market price.
So how do you avoid that. Here are 3 marketing strategies to consider…
1. Re-locate
2. Re-purpose
3. Re-imagine
David elaborated on these 3 ideas and provided illustrations of using them successfully.
For example…
…one classic marketing case study involves the classic “Ant Farm” product. Originally, this was an educational tool. Then marketer Ben Suarez re-positioned the product as a toy…and the rest, as they say, is marketing history.
Another success involved a graphic artist positioning his art as part of an award, rather than trying to sell it on a stand-alone basis.
David White also provided some handy tips on how to go about coming up with ways to implement these 3 big ideas.
The first 2, simply enough, are…
1. Make the decision to NOT be a commodity. Don’t accept the conventional wisdom about your product or service.
2. Look to be the “Category of One” and don’t sell or market in a highly competitive environment. For example, if everyone is primarily marketing online…test going offline!
Great presentation from David that sparked off a lively discussion.
One, almost unnoticed bonus, an extension of the classic “Message-Market-Media” GKIC marketing formula to include 2 further elements for success.
Next, the great Fergus McClelland gave an all-too-brief presentation on how to use your voice more effectively on the telephone. I confess that I wasn’t aware that on the telephone you do not hear the same breadth of sound as you do face-to-face with someone.
That means you have to consciously “stretch” your voice when on the phone to keep attention and get your message across. Fergus delivered some great tips about how to do that…along with how to know when someone is lying to you.
In the next session speaker and iMA expert James Knight took a look at the recent debt-crisis talks between Greece and its creditors through the lens of the iMA system.
If you’re not familiar with iMA, James describes it as…
“…an exciting new universal language, designed to maximise connectivity i.e. mutual liking, trust, understanding and respect.
Every one in the world speaks one of four iMA dialects, putting her/him on the same wavelength as 25% of the world’s population. The majority of people, many of whom are important to your success, are on a different wavelength than you.
The universal language of iMA is a simple way of observing and understanding the differences in people, then connecting with them on their wavelength. When this happens communication, trust, understanding, co-operation and sales go up, and stress and tension go down.”
iMA is a typology system and is similar in some respects to some of the better known systems. Where it differs is in the application and the emphasis on building stronger inter-personal connections.
Back to the Greece talks…
…and James looked at how the different iMA styles of the main participants impacted on the course of the talks. In particular, how initially the talks were deadlocked and how a resolution (of sorts) only became possible when there were changes to the personnel on both sides.
More about the iMA approach at imastrategies.com OR ima-strategies.com.
Chris Payne came next…
…continuing his recent series of presentations about the power of stories and how to use them in your marketing to make more money.
On this occasion, Chris…
1. Provided a quick recap on how to use stories in your marketing (in particular, with case studies and client testimonials)
2. Delivered an update on his campaign for Sarah Staar
3. Revealed the tools he uses to capture stories (in particular Evernote) and his process to source stories on an ongoing basis
Much more about Chris at his website…
Finally, Lisa Catto gave a presentation about the Lifestyle Marketing cycle…
…and how to use automation to make your marketing more effective.
In particular, Lisa is an expert with Infusionsoft, probably the leading CRM (“Customer Relationship Managment”) system for direct response marketers and widely used in the GKIC community. Now, Infusionsoft is a heavy-duty CRM and is not suitable for every business. However, if you’re a serious direct response marketer with a reasonable size business, Infusionsoft is well worth checking out.
More about Lisa and how she and her team can help with marketing automation at http://thebackoffice.eu/
Next meeting of the GKIC London Chapter is scheduled for Tuesday 18 August. Details at the link GKIC London.