Who We Are

As a 19 year old kid (too inexperienced and honestly too stupid to know it wouldn’t work), I started a floor covering business in 1984, coinciding with one of the worst economic downturns in United States history.

Unemployment was at an all-time high, inflation was through the roof and interest rates were insane!

None of these statistics meant anything to me though. All I knew was that I’d succeed, and that I just needed to make my dream a reality.

I didn’t have the money to do a massive advertising campaign using the conventional advertising means – you know, yellow pages, radio, TV and print media. Nevertheless, in my mind none of that mattered. The situation wasn’t “I can’t make this work.” Instead, my perspective was “How can I make this work?”

Through rapid trial and error/fail, I tried conventional print ads but got no response.

So I didn’t do that again!

Maybe I was getting smarter. Maybe that’s why I didn’t get addicted to the “normal” kind of advertising used by so many businesspeople.

Instead I looked at my situation as it was, and not the way the advertising salespeople told me to.

I knew who my market was. I realized I needed to contact them directly, systematically, and personally.

Unknowingly, I learned the first step for successful marketing – know your customer.

I learned later that this is the way all highly successful marketers approach any successful marketing effort – deciding in definite terms who your customer is.

But I still hadn’t figured out how to contact them -

I lived in a resort town near Lake Tahoe, California, and most homes built in that area were second homes for families from the valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. I soon learned that most of my sales were being lost to one store, the one located at the first exit off the freeway.

What was happening?

When these consumers were getting close to needing floor-covering for their new home, they stopped at this store. A relationship was started with Jim at that store, which followed through to a sale.

Hmmmmm.

What to do?

I knew I needed to get my message to these people before they got off the freeway and drove to that competing store.

I had a message. I could give them better value, better service – no, everything I had to offer was way better than what Jim had!

I had a clear and distinctive message to give to a very specific group of people. Here’s the second step to a highly successful marketing effort – a compelling and distinctive message.

I had it!

But how could I get this message to this specifically targeted group of people?

I don’t know where I came up with it, but somehow it occurred to me that every new house needed a building permit.

At that time most of these new houses were contract homes, and the permit was issued in the name of the homeowner.

Perfect! It’s public record!

I went to the county building department on a weekly basis and wrote down the pertinent information about those building permits. These were my prospects.

Now I had the third part of a highly successful marketing effort. This was the vehicle, the medium, to get my message out to the right people.

I sent these prospects a series of letters through the mail that started to build a relationship. I provided a letter welcoming them to the area. I sent letters updating the progress of their construction. I described the climate of the area as well as local items of interest.

I became a trusted friend 4 hours away who was sending them news about their new home.

There is a lot more to this story, but it was the beginning of my education in the fundamental principles I needed to help me build several successful businesses.

The medium in this example was a paper letter with a real postage stamp on it, but other than that, it’s almost identical to successful email marketing. The parallels are uncanny.

So, what about now?

Well, marketing is marketing is marketing.

Profound, huh?

Nowadays we have incredible technology that makes it possible to do exactly what I did more than 20 years ago – automatically and with great precision. (Precision and automation like we never dreamed of in the 1980′s.)

Every day here at My Giddy Aunt Marketing, we see new technology developing to market business more effectively.

This doesn’t mean that technology replaces good marketing acumen, though. Without the fundamentals, this technology is just a precision tool in the hands of a monkey.