Do Business Well

Suddenly, the old crowd was back. When he asked why they had not come a few kilometres down the road to Morningside, they all said it was too far.

In Australia, Thomas Cook had a busy office at the north end of Bankstown Shopping Centre. One day I analysed the postal codes of its clients and found they all came from the north — they drove into the shopping centre from that point, shopped at that end of the shopping centre and drove away.

If Thomas Cook had put in offices on the south, east and west sides they would have quadrupled their business.

The Mars Bar people found the same thing in New York. The city blocks are big enough to have multiple, multi-purpose corner stores, and analysis showed that different corner outlets sold different sweets, depending on the socio-economic standing of the people coming the quickest way down their ‘animal tracks’ for their newspapers, magazines, croissants, sweets and household goods.

When you choose the business you want to be in, let it be an easily understood and simple one to promote regularly and relentlessly within 90 days. People are complex and simple at the same time. The less effort they have to expend, mentally and physically, to make a purchase decision, the more successful you will be. If you have a passion for anything obvious, like hairdressing, printing, retailing, the restaurant business, owning a boutique, your own legal firm, an accounting firm, whatever, do what McDonald’s does — check that the local population can handle another one of what it is you want to do. If the answer is yes, you will have a simple time promoting it if it’s well understood to begin with.

After that, it is up to you to have the best business because you have the greatest passion and the greatest desire to serve your clients well.

‘If you have a job without aggravations, you don’t have a job.’

Allow yourself to become as single-minded about your business as the Coca-Cola Company is. Coca-Cola has spent billions on marketing and continues to do so, reaching an average of about 20 per cent of the world’s soft-drink market.

This giant, international company consistently spends a colossal amount ($500-million in the United States alone) to sell its product, single-mindedly saying the same things over and over again in what look like new and different ways.

Single-minded repetition

The reason why it’s necessary to be single-minded is that only about one per cent of the human brain is available to take in any corporate messages. Our own lives tie up about 99 per cent of our brains: work, home, finances, children, in-laws, weddings, divorces, medical issues, birthdays and holidays.

With all of that and more on our minds, why would we be listening to the incredible volume of advertising messages that assault our eyes and ears every day? Who cares when the rest of the day is falling down around our feet or shrilling down our

ears?

Regular, single-minded contact with prospects is the only way to make them take notice of you. You may have found that your first round of mailing and phoning netted a one-half to one per cent response, with people actually saying ‘Yes’ to appointments and some even giving you business.

This suggests that your mailing package and phoning programme were successful, so do not change anything significantly.

With the second round there is the temptation to design something entirely new in order to excite yourself and everybody around you. Resist that temptation. You can design a variation on your original theme but, at all costs, defend your right to bore yourself and your workplace associates.

Some examples: the little red man on the Johnnie Walker Scotch bottles has never varied; the Christian Dior pink oval stands out on product packs which you cannot identify except that they are from Dior; the Mercedes star would say Mercedes no matter where you found it; roses will always stand for love and romance; diamonds have little more glitter than glass but the endless romantic advertising ensures that no wise man would ever give a piece of glass instead.

Yes, you can repeat yourself endlessly, as Coca-Cola does. When you think of straying from the path ask yourself, ‘Has Coca-Cola ever changed its image significantly?’ It has always been a fun product for lively, beautiful people who go leaping around beaches and mountains and cities, in and out of surf and snow, up and down and around on roller blades and who do wonderful, happy things while drinking Coke.

If Coca-Cola’s message hasn’t changed significantly over the years, your own successful message need not change either. Continue to bore yourself; you won’t be a bore to the outside world.

You can vary your theme, as in Coke/Coca-Cola or Big Mac/McDonald’s providing you create a relevant sound, but don’t deviate as far as to call your product ‘the Big Cold One’ or ‘the Big Hot One’, for example. The phrase is too long to be catchy, unlike ‘Coke’ or ‘Big Mac’. ‘Big Chill’ and ‘Big Hot’ don’t work either because they have emotional overtones of being freezing and boiling — an unpleasant way to be drinking and eating. Always avoid anything unpleasant!

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