Chinese Finger Trap
By Dean Higginbotham, CTO Mall23.com
When I was a kid, we used to have these toys. Little colorful woven bamboo toys you and a friend push your fingers into. The harder you try and pull your finger out, the harder it grabs. To get your fingers out, you have to do exactly the opposite of what seems logical, and push, rather than pull.
Sometimes marketing is this way. You can market for yourself, your company, or as a hired consultant for a client. With whatever your marketing reasons or goals, often times, its best to push rather than pull.
Typical marketing dictates companies dump loads of cash to spread the brand name wide and far. Yell as loud as possible. Make as much of a ruckus as possible. Tell everyone. Keep in close touch with customers, phone often, send out mailers, thank you notes, and more.
Ironically, in some cases, this tends to get you ignored (or even disliked - take AOL for example) more than doing nothing. Or, better than doing nothing, try acting as an independent entity -- above the noise of your "typical" competitor.
For example: Google. How much did they spend on marketing? Did they have to spend anything? Why have you never (or rarely -- and only in the beginning) see any banner ads for Google? Their brand and product marketed itself. And, they were sure enough to know they were the best. This feeling and their attitudes conveyed through their website. They didn't need to advertise. They were better than that. They knew you will want to tell your friends -- because we are something you can't live without.
Now I wouldn't say this is the best method for all situations. Nor, would I say to use this method exclusively. However, I offer this up as a different perspective on a paradigm that has, so far, been taught to marketing teams as gospel.
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Did You Know...
- MySpace has approximately 8,200 user groups dedicated to entrepreneurship and business. Some with as many as 17,000 members!
- Exxon is poised to overtake Microsoft as cash king with $31.9 billion at the end of March, compared to Microsoft at $34.8 billion.
- Wal-Mart is attempting to trademark the yellow smily face after SmileyWorld first began it's attempt.
Advanced Custom
This section is for our advanced developers who are customizing Mall23 for their clients.
I'd like to create a "For Sale" page that lists all my clearance items.
There are two ways of doing this depending on the layout you like.
Using the first method, you modify the ListProduct.asp page. Open ListProduct.asp and search for "If ( bSpecials = "T" ) Then". We are going to mimic the Specials. Each place you find the text, add a new If/Then or ElseIf/Then using "If ( bSpecials = "C" ) Then". The "C" tells us to display the Clearance products.
Copy the code from the bSpecials If/Then into the cooresponding bSpecials = "C" section and change the text from referring to "Specials" to "Clearance". The only exception is the SELECT statement with the first bSpecials If/Then. With that, change the "P.hotDeal = -1" to "P.Clearance = -1".
The second method uses a copy of the Default.asp page. Copy it to a new Specials.asp page and open that in an editor. (You might like to remove the two calls to DispProductColumn() as they will be redundant.) Look for the first SELECT statements. There should be two that are nearly identical. Change both by replacing the "showInHome" with "Clearance". Simple!
Now that you have changed the files, make a link to your new Specials page. With the first method: ListProduct.asp?bSpecials=C. The second method uses: Specials.asp (the sM23StoreUrlNonSSL ensures the user returns to a non-SSL url).
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