Crooked Stamps and Slit Wrists

May 15th, 2008 Chris Posted in Marketing | No Comments »

As I was leaving my job at Entrust where I used to work, Colleen wanted to introduce me to the world of micro business marketing by going with her to a Dan Kennedy event. You may have heard of this guy – he’s basically built a marketing empire around helping micro and small businesses market and sell more.

So, we headed off to this event last year and let me tell you – I had a full blown coronary. You have to remember that I, like many in the corporate world, was used to a formalized marketing process with things like marketing plans, message documents, etc… And typically the details of implementation were handled by specialists in the Product Marketing and Marketing Communication departments. And all was designed for BB2BB (big business to big business) marketing.

So in I walked and in my first session the tactics of mailers were being discussed. To my horror, there was a long conversation over the placement of stamps. Did you know that hand stamping increases open rate? Even better yet, if you place the stamps in a crooked fashion, your open rate increases even more.

After twenty years in larger organizations, the vision of my new career centering on placing crooked stamps was almost enough to drive me to do myself in. What was I going to do? I had already given notice! Luckily, we were at lunch when the full crisis hit and all there was on the table was a butter knife. It was full blown case of congnitive dissonance at a self-destructive level.

Luckily Colleen talked me off the cliff. Turns out that there were additional sessions that were much, much more interesting and applicable to our biz (with tactics I didn’t find completely demeaning). Much of it is still completely counter-intuitive to me and my residial corporate brain. But, the techniques I learned do actually work. I’ll talk about some of my best lessons learned over the next few weeks.

For for anyone really interested in drinking from the firehouse – check out this year’s event. Now remember – the techniques that work may clang with everything you learned in big business so do not panic when you see 10 feet long web pages and cheesey pop-ups. Trust me – this stuff works (even if I hate it).

C.