Doing the unexpected
Monday 9th March 2009
With many businesses feeling the effects of the global credit slowdown, there is no better time to be focusing on your customers and working to build and maintain your relationships with them.
'Word of Mouth' referrals have been proven time and again to bring the best customers to your business. There is no higher praise than to have someone genuinely recommend your services and products to their friends. I expect a close friend will have made such a recommendation to you over the last week, it could have been anything from music, to clothes, or a service on the internet. If they were particularly keen, I'd guess that even if you've not bought (or borrowed!) you will have already looked into the recommendation further.
I'll share one of mine from this week, which you should be able to relate to (though I appreciate the music will not be to the taste of everyone). A particularly excited friend told me about the new Prodigy album and as yet it has not left the CD player in the car. The whole album is amazing, but what really makes it for me is the final track, a complete diversion from the normal Prodigy style which really caught my attention, and led to some inspiration regarding doing things a little differently...
It's becoming increasingly difficult, with the millions of products and services available to us today, to stand out from the crowds and this is where you need to go for the exceptions. If you want people to talk about you, you have to surprise them! Don't be afraid to stand out and continually do something different. Some fantastic examples of this are the Innocent Smoothie Company (in the UK) and ZOPA (UK, US and Italy amongst others.) Both of these companies are renowned for doing the unexpected. Innocent gave a fantastic example of this in 2008 that there has been much talk about, both on and off the web. They asked a number of 'grannies' in the UK to knit thousands of little hats for their smoothie bottles to keep them warm in winter, and they gave half of the proceeds to the Age Concern charity, to give a little something back! ZOPA set up the first major online person-to-person loan company which allows people to skip banks and lend money in a properly managed system to each other, because of this person-to-person lending the business has seen amazingly rapid organic growth as they've been recommended by both borrowers and lenders to their friends and associates.
While you don't necessarily need to do something of this scale, it's ideas like these that give people a reason to talk about you, a reason to believe in you and a reason to support you.
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Article written by, Oliver Stockman, Head of Marketing for ionix Limited.
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