The Amish RV Company: The Best-Kept Secret

My company, LaBov & Beyond Marketing Communications, worked with an Amish recreational vehicle company for years. I love the response when I tell people that--they always smile. It sounds like the opening line to a joke. But it was no joke.

The president at the time, who was a fantastic gentleman, told me they were "the best-kept secret" in the RV business. They made the best product, but few people knew about them.

Think about it. When is it ever good to be a "best-kept secret"? Maybe if you were a secret agent or in the CIA. But if you sell a product and it's a secret, you're in trouble.

I told the president, after he hired us, that if one year from that day they were still a best-kept secret, we'd resign the account--too humiliating to be the marketing agency for a best-kept secret.

Turns out the Amish RV company made a great product, but other than putting out brochures, they never engaged their dealers to sell. They took care of customers' problems brilliantly, but never reached out to them otherwise.

All we did was help them balance their approach to marketing (less focus on brochures, more focus on generating action, improving the customer experience, and energizing the dealers).

And by the way, the Amish were fun to work with.

Barry LaBov
LaBov & Beyond Marketing Communications
www.labov.com

Falling in love with a sweetheart product

It's easy to be fired up about a great product your company makes: it's clever, it's ingenuous, it works and it's been increasing sales at a 30% clip for the last year. Sounds amazing. But...

Do you have other products that are old (mature) that still outsell the sweetheart? Are you profitable with those products? Do customers love those products too?

We have to treat our product lines like we should treat our children--with no favoritism.

That sweetheart product may be cool, but it may not make you any money. That old dog product may be helping to fund the sweetheart--let's show the old dog a little love.


Barry LaBov
LaBov & Beyond
www.labov.com

Field of Dreams Marketing Part 2

In the previous post, the focus was on "Field of Dreams" Marketing--where you build a nice company with nice products and people and expect customers to flock to it, only to be disappointed.

Here's a way to tell if you're engaged in a Field of Dreams Marketing approach. Are you surprised that a competitor of yours has mediocre or poor product yet does very well? Or that your customers don't understand how great your product is?

In our sound byte world, the customer will give you only a few moments to differentiate you versus the competition. The simplest answer is to develop your elevator speech so that any customer or prospect can quickly understand just how great you are.

If you can simply articulate what makes your company special, that's a start. That message needs to be repeated in every communication you do from internal marketing to your sales channel and on into your external advertising and marketing.

If you can't articulate what makes you special, why should we expect customers to do just that?

Field of Dreams Marketing Part 1

Remember the Kevin Costner movie where the guy was building a baseball field in his backyard so that his late father and other great baseball players would appear and play ball? The recurring line in the movie was "build it and he will come."

Field of Dreams Marketing or "Build it and they will come" is the marketing approach of too many companies. It's tempting to think that if you build a good company--good quality, good people, good pricing, etc.--that the customers will come.

No matter how good your people or product are, if customers can't succinctly understand what you do and aren't excited about it, they will not come.