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Creative Chaos

© Bert Markgraf

In the past, you could gain an edge by doing some good, solid marketing. Doing some market research and some well-based targeting of your efforts would lead to quick rewards. Run a newsletter or some well-focused direct mail and you got great response. A quick mailing of some unusual Christmas give-aways and your favourite customers would be suitably impressed. No longer. Now everyone is doing it. In fact everyone is doing everything. It is getting really hard to impress your favourite customers.

What works now is creativity and focusing on the needs of your customers. I remember being impressed the first time the dealer had filled up the gas tank when I bought a car. Now they're all doing it but it was the first one who impressed. I'm also impressed when kits have extra items of things like fasteners (in case one breaks or you lose one), when things comes with good batteries, when computer parts come with long wires and cables and when adapters are included, just in case you have the wrong kind of plug.

The key is to identify what would make the lives of your customers just a little bit easier or a little bit more pleasant without costing you too much, too much being relative to the amount of extra or return business you could expect to gain. This is important because the whole thing has to make business sense - if it doesn't, you're just making your customers pay extra.

Finally, it is no longer enough to identify such creative little strategies and to carry them out. Soon everyone is copying them and your customers are expecting them. Much more effective in today's marketplace is to take such strategies to extremes for a short period of time and then to come up with something new, basically in such a chaotic way that your competitors never catch up because you're completely unpredictable.

This site gives 24 creative ways to increase your sales. Some of them can easily be taken to extremes. What you'll accomplish is to get the attention of your customers, even if the promotion is only for a very short time.