A Vision for Success

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Many small business owners go into business by accident. They saw an opportunity and grabbed it. The original excitement of the opportunity and even some early success may have sustained them for a while, but sooner or later, the need for hard slog becomes necessary. What happens next can make a huge difference to your business.

When the hard slog starts, most business owners just keep slogging a way in the direction they started, using brute force to build their business. Long hours, lots of money spent on advertising, and sheer persistence. Then after a number of years, they find out what they have is not what they want. Only then do they step back and do what their smart colleagues do right from the start.

The smart business owner creates a vision for their business. This will be in alignment with their own personal objectives. It could be to retire in 10 years with a million dollars. It could that it will generate enough income so they need only work 3 days a week and can take 3 months off overseas each year. To achieve these personal goals, the business must meet certain goals – to produce the income required and to operate in a way that allows the lifestyle desired.

This vision for the business then must become more specific and describe what the business does, who it does it for and how it does it. The business must be built upon the strengths of the owners and the opportunities they see. At this stage, the vision may still be cloudy, but you must start somewhere. Only once this vision for the business has been created, can goals and plans be developed.

Creating such a vision can be difficult for many people, but there is a simple free tool that owners can use to develop their vision. The Mission Statements Made Easy Tool steps you through a process to create your own vision, and then enables you to produce a certificate that you print, frame, and place where you can see it everyday, so you will have a constant reminder of why you started your business, and where you are going with it.

With a vision clearly defined, when the slogging gets tough, the owner can step back, re-affirm their vision: that they are on the right track, or whether there is a better path to take to achieve their objective. With a vision, you have a compass for the business, so that the owner does not spend years building something that they don’t want.

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Small Business Achiever Issue 108

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Each month in the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief, we reveal strategies and tactics that will enable you to multiply your profits and make your business run without you. Unlike articles you will see in business magazines that are just teasers to get you to call the author and pay them thousands of dollars for their wisdom, in the Business Owner Brief, we spell out step-by-step, what you need to do to achieve your goals. Nothing is left out.

In next month's Achiever, learn how to:

-Make a Splash in the Media

-Decide whether an Investment in Your Business is Worth It

-Use Google Adwords to Get Business without Losing Your Shirt

Each month not only do you receive top quality briefs on how you can achieve your business goals and hundreds of dollars of bonuses, you can also participate in Group Coaching with Dr Greg Chapman, the author of
"The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success" where your personal business questions will be answered.

What value do you place on achieving your business goals if you could get a shortcut to success?

The Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief is your Unfair Business Advantage!

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

The Australian Small Business Blog

The Importance of Presentation Skills in Small Business

by Judith Field

Did you know that other than technical skills, that is, being great at computers, selling, art, music, or what ever you do, the most important skill you can have in life is the ability to communicate confidently. Promotion depends on it; relationships depend on it; most important of all, personal self esteem and confidence depend on the ability to communicate confidence.

The good news is that it can be learned. Research shows that 80% of speaking ability is knowing what to do, how to do it and when to do it.

Most of speaking is in the body language. Where you stand, how you look at the audience, what you do with your hands and feet, all count more, than what you say.

Then voice variety: tone, volume, pitch, pace, and timbre of your voice, all covey more than the words. Most people don’t know this. They don’t know how to vary their voice or even where to project from.

Finally, the content or material you say, is the least remembered and least important. So, simple, clear easy to relate words are the ones to say and the ones that are most memorable.

Now, it usually takes a while to learn these skills and most people think it is hard to learn. However, when you have a presenter who makes it fun, interesting and hands on, it can be learned quite quickly and can be life changing.

Judith Field is the director of Direct Speech. Check out her website at and learn how you can change your business and life through public speaking.

The Australian Small Business Blog

Buying and Selling on Price

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

All businesses should endeavour to create points of differences for their product or service, but what about if you are selling an undifferentiated product, something that is truly a commodity, such as petrol or even bottles of Coca Cola (which of itself is not a commodity, but you will get exactly the same product whether it’s from a milk bar or supermarket, here or across the country). Businesses that sell commodity products tend to sell with price as a point of difference.

There are two things that influence this:

• geographical location (convenience and cost of supply), and
• buyer knowledge of the market place.

Taking the first point, geography, this is about how far you are prepared to chase a bargain. You might drive across town to save $100 on a refrigerator, but would you do the same for a $1 saving on a six pack of Coke? Probably not. Economists call this the cost of shoe leather- this distance and effort you would give in time and money to achieve that saving.

What does this mean for your business? When setting commodity pricing, you only need to survey your competitors in your ‘economic’ neighbourhood.

The second factor influencing this is the buyer knowledge of your price difference. If they don’t know about it, they will not find you and may pay more than they should. This is why petrol stations have massive signs proclaiming their prices. Which brings me to the latest government efforts to increase consumer knowledge of prices. Will this really help small business and give lower prices to consumers?

First of all there is FuelWatch currently only operating in WA. Most motorists when they are low on fuel, like to fill up while they are already in their car on some other errand, rather than make a special trip. Generally this means they may pass half a dozen petrol stations (depending on the length of the trip) and will be able to see variations in price on station signage, and would be able to determine a good price for that part of their city at the time they are wishing to fill.

Service stations are highly competitive changing their prices several times a day. Can you think of any other product where that happens? The station owner will opportunistically drop their prices if their sales are low, and increase them when it is high. This is exactly how a good market should operate. By enforcing the price changes once per day, the motorist will be the loser. I would also expect that the independents will lose, as they are the most nimble. This will ultimately see a loss of competition- the opposite of what the government is trying to achieve.

The other scheme introduced by the government is GroceryChoice. In this scheme, the results that are reported are a month old, while grocery prices change at least weekly. (At least FuelWatch reported daily.) Also the baskets used are not transparent, so you have no idea whether this represents what you would buy. So consumers will ignore this, and still look to newspapers to see where the best prices are every week.

At one level, you might argue that this is a largely harmless waste of taxpayer funds, but there is a more ominous side. While people will not use this site much, when they do it will re-enforce the supermarket duopoly between Coles and Woolworths (Safeway). These two chains monitor their competition’s prices very closely. The website results prove this with only cents different between the two.

Where there is a significant difference is between the big chains and the independents whose prices are higher. Now there will be independents that are cheaper for some things than the big two, but because there are so many of them, the government has lumped them all together. However, from the consumer perspective, it ‘proves’ that they are cheaper than the independents. No wonder Coles and Woolworths love this! Once again, by interfering in the market, the government will drive the independents out and lessen competition, resulting in higher prices.

If businesses are selling commodities, and selling on price, advertising that fact is important, but when governments involve themselves in the marketplace to fix something that is not broken, casualties are inevitable and ultimately consumers and small business owners are the losers.

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Turning Bad Publicity into Good

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Imagine you have a business which is constantly criticised by the politically correct who seem to be able to get airtime effortlessly. How do you compete? You can advertise, but this is just dismissed as self promotion, and of course the largest outlet for the politically correct, the ABC doesn’t allow advertising (unless you are flogging a book or a play on a politically correct subject).

Well there is a way. You can get someone that the critics admire, and have even used in their own campaigns to endorse you. Let me present a case study.

Recently McDonalds put out a press release that they had developed a range of meals that have the Heart Foundation Tick of Approval. The critics went ballistic. They criticised McDonalds, they criticised the Heart Foundation. They were on every airwave denouncing the big bad US fast food company. They had always hated McDonalds. It's an American company. It is a multinational. It promotes fast food regarded as unhealthy – there is apparently no safe level of consumption for this food. This last argument being the one they push hardest as the others are obviously political.

Then that most trusted judge of what is good and bad to eat, the Heart Foundation, endorsed a range of McDonalds meals. How could they? How dare they? They could not argue that the Heart Foundation assessment of the meals was wrong. Their argument was that maybe someone might order a big Mac with their Heart Foundation approved salad!

How would all this help McDonalds? Firstly, the reporting that they had earned the Heart Foundation tick was received well in many quarters, if not the ABC. Secondly, the ABC and other disapproving media when reporting on this news, did, to their credit, interview people from the Heart Foundation and McDonalds who were able to put their case. In much of the coverage, their critics just sounded shrill. For McDonalds, it created the opportunity to access media channels that would normally be closed to them unless it was a bad news story.

The final picture that was left with media consumers, is that you can get healthy meals at McDonalds. In the reporting, McDonalds had the news, and the critics were just replaying the same old arguments that had been heard time and again. The critics had been wedged, and thus their arguments were diluted. McDonalds had taken them on directly, and all they had left was their politics.

Was McDonalds devious enough to plan this reaction from their critics to massively leverage their media exposure from a single day to weeks? I don’t know, but the reaction of the politically correct critics on border patrol was entirely predictable. They just couldn’t help themselves.

You can use controversy to promote your business, but make sure you have someone in authority’s tick of approval to back you up!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Small Business Achiever 107

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Each month in the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief, we reveal strategies and tactics that will enable you to multiply your profits and make your business run without you. Unlike articles you will see in business magazines that are just teasers to get you to call the author and pay them thousands of dollars for their wisdom, in the Business Owner Brief, we spell out step-by-step, what you need to do to achieve your goals. Nothing is left out.

In this next month's Achiever, learn how to:

-How to Leverage Your Business with Other Businesses

-How to Create a Business System that Turns Your Job into a Business

-What to Put on Your Website to Make People Call You.

Each month not only do you receive top quality briefs on how you can achieve your business goals and hundreds of dollars of bonuses, you can also participate in Group Coaching with Dr Greg Chapman, the author of
"The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success" where your personal business questions will be answered.

What value do you place on achieving your business goals if you could get a shortcut to success?

The Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief is your Unfair Business Advantage!

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

The Australian Small Business Blog

Customer Service and Having a Nice Day

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

When you hear in a shop assistant say to you as you leave: “Have a nice day”, how do you react. Do you think:

“Thank you for your kind words”

or do you just think:

“This just a meaningless marketing gesture”

Well let me tell you a story from the land that created “Have a nice day”.

We lived for a number of years in the USA and our next move was to the UK. It is interesting to compare attitudes. Our relocation was organised by international removalists. The same company packed us up in the US that unpacked us in the UK, using local staff in each case.

After living in the US for 3 years, we had collected a lot of stuff. So much stuff in fact, it took three days to pack up everything, which gave us an opportunity to see how the employees of this company operated.

Each morning, at exactly the anointed time, there was a ring of the doorbell. Out on the doorstep, there was a team of five men, all smartly dressed in their uniforms, with the team leader, greeting us with a cheery good morning.

They explained exactly what the process was going to be, and over the course their time working in our house, they were courteous, acted on our concerns about fragile items, and silly knick-knacks which would look like junk to any normal person, and treating carefully the many, many books we had accumulated- which were real treasures for my wife. They also left the house each day as tidy as you could it expect it to be- with all rubbish removed.

At any time if they had concerns about the best way of managing something, they politely asked us how we would like it handled. During this stressful time for the whole family, these men made the whole process as painless as possible. Would I recommend them? Wholeheartedly, but with one reservation….

In the UK it was another story. Remember, this was the same company, but with UK staff.

Each day, the staff were late. They always had an excuse, it was those incompetents in head office. They were always taking breaks. They would disappear without notice. Half the team would be absent. There would be different people on different days. There was swearing (although not directly at us- but there was mutterings under their breath). There was resentment at the amount of stuff we had. There were breakages- things that crossed thousands of miles intact, were broken by rough treatment during unpacking. There was knocking off early, and leaving the house a mess. There was no communication on what would happen the next day.

The big difference between the two countries was attitude. In one, the staff new that customer service was part of their job. In the other, they were just putting in the hours. So my reservation in using this company, would be to steer clear of its UK branch.

I soon noticed this attitude in other employees I dealt with in other businesses in the UK. It was quite pervasive. I reached a conclusion about the attitude about the two cultures and my reaction as a customer to that attitude:

I preferred to be told: “Have a nice day” by someone that doesn’t mean it, than to be told; “Sod Off!” by someone who does.

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Godzilla (ACCC) vs eBay

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

While the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission spends a lot of time keeping an eye on the big end of town, every once in a while it takes on an issue of interest to small business. A while ago I wrote an article on the ACCC taking on Google (Godzilla vs Google) where I said that while some aspects of the ACCC case were valid, I thought that the a big part of it was futile.

However, ACCC have now taken on eBay for an entirely different matter, and this time I believe they are on stronger ground.

eBay issued an edict last month that from now on all sellers would have to use Paypal, the eBay owned payment gateway, (except if they use COD). The issue with this is that Paypal charges higher fees than other payment gateways and the ACCC regards this is monopolistic bullying behaviour of eBays clients to force them to use its financial services provider to increase their profits.

Now if eBay did this as a start-up venture, and it was just a condition of selling on their platform, it would not be an issue as there may have been a number of other similar sized auction houses providing similar services, but it did not do this when they were small, as it may have scared off sellers with its higher fees. Instead, eBay waited until they dominated the market before they tried this on.

Initially, eBay was going to ignore the ACCC’s ruling, after all, Australia is a small country, and it did not want its really biggest markets getting similar ideas. However, there has been a worldwide backlash against eBay by sellers on this, and other countries competition regulators took a keen interest in what was happening here which is widely seen as a test case.

The current state of play, is that eBay has realised it can’t thumb its nose at the ACCC and just impose its plan on Australian sellers and will now fight this in court. With the ACCC having tasted blood in some very high profile recent cases, eBay is getting nervous.

Here is an excerpt from an email sent to eBay sellers this week:

Changes to eBay.com.au scheduled for 15 July are being postponed until the review process with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regarding its recent draft notice is complete. As previously announced, eBay.com.au is continuing to work with the ACCC to achieve an outcome that benefits buyers and sellers

Changes that came into effect on 21 May 2008, requiring all sellers to offer PayPal, will remain. These changes mean that all buyers have the option of choosing PayPal, the safer payment method for shopping on eBay.com.au. Payment methods that are currently permitted will continue to be allowed on eBay.com.au until further notice. (my emphasis)

How deliberately misleading is this? In the second paragraph they at first seem to be saying you have to use Paypal, and later on grudgingly admitting that you can use other options. Arguments can be made to favour the use of Paypal, making the transaction safer for all, but rather than making this case, it wants to force its customers to pay more.

From a customer service perspective, what does this say about eBay. Would you want to continue to use them if you had a choice?

Go Godzilla!

UPDATE: eBay now forcing people to include Paypal as a payment option and deleting auctions where a preference for another payment option is given. Game On!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Small Business Achiever 106

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Each month in the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief, we reveal strategies and tactics that will enable you to multiply your profits and make your business run without you. Unlike articles you will see in business magazines that are just teasers to get you to call the author and pay them thousands of dollars for their wisdom, in the Business Owner Brief, we spell out step-by-step, what you need to do to achieve your goals. Nothing is left out.

In this next month's Achiever, learn how to:

-More Ways to Increase Your Prices - How to Package Value

-Create an Extra Hour in Your Day

-Use Offline Promotion to Increase Your Website Traffic and Sales.

Each month not only do you receive top quality briefs on how you can achieve your business goals and hundreds of dollars of bonuses, you can also participate in Group Coaching with Dr Greg Chapman, the author of
"The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success" where your personal business questions will be answered.

What value do you place on achieving your business goals if you could get a shortcut to success?

The Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief is your Unfair Business Advantage!

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

The Australian Small Business Blog

Working Smarter, Not Harder

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

The idea of working smarter not harder is a mantra most businesses owners understand even if they don’t actually follow it. Small Business owners often believe that big organisations have this nailed. However, after an interesting time in politics this week, you can see that our prime minister has not got this nailed.

I don’t care what your politics are, no-one would disagree our prime minister works extremely hard. He also has a hard earned reputation as a micro-manager and a control freak. He appears very busy, but is he affective?

When you run a business as big as the country, you can’t do it on your own. However, the way it is currently run, all decisions are being made by Mr Rudd and his office. His ministers are being over-ruled and the advice of their departments ignored. Now the peasants are revolting!

How long can he expect them to work the way he does if he doesn’t value their input and expertise. Where this will end is the staff (the public servants) will go through the motions, doing just enough to keep their jobs, knowing that he will in the end change whatever they suggest and do it his way. Why would you put in extra effort if it is not valued and recognised. Note, in small business ‘staff’ also applies to your contractors and suppliers.

When a business owner, or even Mr Rudd, have a bad week like this, their response is usually to resolve to work harder. This ultimately ends up driving away their staff and destroying themselves. Do you really believe becoming more productive at being ineffective will improve your business? Does any of this resonate for your business?

So what should Mr Rudd do? Well he could learn how to work smarter by attending my

Get Your Business Into Gear This Financial Year – Business Owners Retreat

although I don’t think there will be enough seating for his retinue. Alternatively, here are a few steps he should take:

1. Step Back! Review where you are going so you can prioritise. Otherwise you will spend your time reacting to every event that could be handled by others. You will become a firefighter, rather than leaving your staff to fight the fires so you have more time to look at ways to stop them starting in the first place. By fighting them yourself, you will have implicitly told your staff that you don’t trust them, and think they are incompetent. If you really believe that is true, replace them, although most times, the fault lies with you.

2. Share your vision with your staff and align their personal goals with your business objectives. Remember, they will not be as driven as you because you get most of the recognition and rewards. Wherever possible share these with your staff. Don’t hog the limelight.

3. Clearly define their roles, responsibilities and authority and let them do their jobs. You can’t control everything. If you continually intervene, your staff will believe that this is not their role, no matter what you say and you will always have to do their jobs for them.

4. Manage your business by reports. This gives you time to work on strategy. You can use the reports to monitor performance.

5. Regularly review your progress and when the facts change, don’t be afraid to review your objectives. (Unfortunately this rarely happens in politics as they tend to lock themselves into ideological, as opposed rational positions. Don’t let this happen to you as a business owner.)

It is often easier to see what others are doing wrong and the impact that it has on them. Learn from them and if you want help working smarter, please find our more about my Business Owners Retreat, and how 2 business owners Doubled their business in a year!

May Your Business Be As You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Small Business Achiever 105

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Each month in the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief, we reveal strategies and tactics that will enable you to massively transform your business and achieve your goals. Unlike articles you will see in business magazines that are just teasers to get you to call the author and pay them thousands of dollars for their wisdom, in the Business Owner Brief, we spell out step-by-step, what you need to do to achieve your goals. Nothing is left out.

In this next month's Achiever, learn how to:

-Use a Sales Pipeline to Double or Triple Your Sales

-Expose Cross Subsidies that Destroy Your Profit

-Conquered Google in 2 Weeks with New Keywords.

Each month not only do you receive top quality briefs on how you can achieve your business goals and hundreds of dollars of bonuses, you can also participate in Group Coaching with Dr Greg Chapman, the author of
"The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success" where your personal business questions will be answered.

What value do you place on achieving your business goals if you could get a shortcut to success?

The Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief is your Unfair Business Advantage!

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

The Australian Small Business Blog

The Forgotten Majority of Business Owners

An Occasional Editorial by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

In Victoria’s state budget last week, the government claimed to be providing assistance to business owners. Leaving aside for the moment, the fact that they returned in taxes only a portion of the tax increase since the last ‘handout’, even this was received by a minority of businesses. That is businesses large enough to pay land and payroll tax.

What about smaller businesses, the micro-businesses representing 61% of all businesses, and employing 26% of the private sector workforce? The government, as always treats the micro-business owner (those with less that 5 employees) as though they don’t really exist – as if they are not proper businesses.

Now the state government doesn’t really take much from them, so it can’t pretend to give anything back. Short of giving micro-businesses wads of free cash- dream on, what could it do? They could reduce red tape and regulation- but that also appears to be an impossible dream.

The most important asset a micro-business owner has is his or her time. How much time do you spend stuck in traffic? Along with most other Victorians, they suffer due to the lack of investment in road infrastructure. They suffer disproportionately more than larger business owners who have a lot more support so they can focus more of their time working on the business.

The cost of delays due to traffic congestion increases every year. A 2005 study showed that congestion in Melbourne cost business $1.4 billion in that year alone, with the figure expected to double in the next decade.

For the small business owner and their staff who rely on road transport, public transport being a non-option, spending several non-productive hours a day in traffic congestion is a major cost to their business. When business owners spend time in a car, rather than providing a service to their customers or finding new customers, this is a huge loss to their business.

While public transport funding is admirable, small business owners, like all road users, see funds raised through road taxes and charges largely diverted to other government programs. Most small business owners support the user pays principle and are not looking for subsidies. They do expect, however, a higher proportion of funds raised by road users to be spent in improving infrastructure.

The current budget, like all recent budgets before, refers to ever more studies and plans but no actual commitment to invest. There are 270,000 businesses with less than 5 employees in Victoria. The rate of growth in the number of these businesses is 11% per year. Small businesses are also responsible for 70% of the employment growth. Why then are the needs of this group always ignored?

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Segmenting Your Market’s Mind

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

One very well known marketing strategy is to segment your market and provide different offers to each segment specially targeted to that segment. If you were Ticketmaster, you might send information on the new opera season to the older segment of your database, and information on touring pop groups to the under 30’s. (Of course there are people under 30 who like opera, but when you want to get the most for your advertising buck, you go where the numbers are.)

Segmenting your market by age, gender, geography, income etc is done all the time by good marketers, but what if you could segment your market by the way they think? How powerful would that be? Saab have done just that. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a link to this novel online ad which is currently showing in the Faifax media, as they rotate their ads, but I will describe it so you will recognise it.

Have you seen the spinning ballerina test? See an example here. It is a rotating image which can be used to tell if your left brain or right brain dominates your thinking. Psychologists tell us that the person who is left brained tends to be more logical, methodical and organised. The right brainers, on the other hand, tend to be driven more by instinct and emotion and are more creative. They also say if you see the lady rotate anticlockwise, you are left brained, clockwise, you are right brained.

So back to the ad, which starts off with this rotating lady. It asks you to see which way the lady rotates for you and then asks you to select the appropriate button. You then get taken to a Saab ad in which the copy is tailored to whether you are left or right brained. If you are left brained, it tells you how many horsepower the car has and how fast it will accelerate and gives you details on the dimensions. If you are right brained, it explains the experience of power and the thrill you get with the acceleration, and the luxurious feel and comfort that the car gives you.

So Saab has created an ad which has been crafted for the way you think and you select the ad that is most likely to be a selling success for you!

For the record, I have seen the lady spin both ways.

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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