Throughout the years one program has constantly gathered a lot of viewers in the Finnish television.
That program is the 10 pm news on MTV3.
The most notable feature of those news is the less serious news story in the end. Usually a short tongue-in-the-cheek story about a topical matter.
Today’s entry is about me and FinderBase. Try not to laugh.
All people have experienced the unfairness of our society. Some have enormous riches and others are poor to their spine. What is even more disturbing is that some lucky bastards seem to be constantly winning with almost zero effort.
The world is innately unfair.
The unfairness is heavily present in the world of marketing. There is a huge illusion that effective marketing would be expensive. Or that the effect of marketing would be in proportion to the money invested in it. This isn’t exactly a surprise because the media has the incentive to keep up this illusion. Media feeds on marketing – or better yet, media feeds on marketing budgets. As if marketing really was a budgetary issue in any way.
The dilemma is that cheap marketing has become unprecedentedly more effective than paid marketing.
Here is once again in a great TED video in less than 17 minutes. Marketing guru Rory Sutherland: Sweat the small stuff.
If your product is a least bit remarkable, you will enjoy a whole lot of marketing envy.
Posted in Daily entries
Tagged cost, expense, fairness, internet marketing, marketing, price, proportion, remarkable, unfair
Cooperation on the business-to-business difficult because different stakeholders have different agendas that they follow.
Best cooperation is such that it fully supports the core business functions of all the stakeholders.
We are aiming just that with our new cooperative campaign targeted to businesses:
English transcript:
If you had a business, would you cooperate with us?
Posted in Daily entries
Tagged b2b, finderbase, kierrätyskeskus, letter, marketing, recycling, sales
A good salesman or a marketer feels they are helping their customers to do better choices for themselves. To appear sincere they actually have to believe in their product themselves.
Most sales and marketing people don’t.
I sincerely believe that FinderBase.com‘s only function is to help people reunite with their lost stuff. To achieve that I think our marketing should be:
These in mind I designed the following:
Found bicycle. Finding the owner is in everyone’s best interest. We’re just delivering the message.
People’s minds are cluttered with marketing information. Where ever you go, you are pushed to think, want, buy now, act now and whatever the marketer has decided you should do.
This makes people wary.
But there are delighting examples of people who can detect sincerity in what companies do. With FinderBase our service offering sounds so amazing that people stop to think about our business model. It is unheard of that a company could be doing something useful for others without trying to benefit.
The basic message is the key.
Reflecting our ideas today, we got quite a valuable piece of advice which applies quite well to almost anything:
Forget the bells and whistles and tell the people the message that they can understand.
If your business idea is new and revolutionary don’t market it as such. Tell the story so that they can relate to.
If you’re the first person to develop an automobile, don’t sell it as a horseless carriage. Sell it as a carriage where the horses are optional. It’s not like people would get rid of their horses overnight, is it?
Posted in Daily entries
Tagged business idea, customer, finderbase, forest, marketing, sales, trees
Marketing is funny because the effect of it is not necessarily in any proportion to the cost and effort that has been put into it.
Internet marking is even funnier.
To point out the different factors that I think control this environment, I’ve sketched a Venn diagram of Internet marketing:
The three factors that I consider important for the effect of the marketing message are:
Every marketing campaign out there has its place on this diagram.
But all marketing should have its target in the middle.
Or at least do one of the following:
Posted in Daily entries
Tagged internet marketing, marketing, price, remarkability, venn diagram, viral
Everybody knows Facebook. Very few people know what it’s good for. An increasing number of people are calling themselves Facebook marketing experts.
But what is successful Facebook marketing?
I think two recent campaigns answer this question quite well:
Which campaign was more successful?
If we ignore the fact that Audi probably paid a bunch of money to an ad agency that came up with their campaign idea, there’s still quite a huge difference in the effect of these campaigns. Audi Finland’s fans joined because they wanted to win a car. There was hardly any reason not to join, you had a chance to win a car doing nothing.
Audi Finland’s end result: 1 winner and 50,000 disappointed fans. With the cost of a car (something like 20,000 €). To cover up this marketing expense, Audi Finland should get dozens of new customers that wouldn’t have bought an Audi if it wasn’t for this campaign.
Kaivurimies on the other hand paid nothing for his campaign. Not only did he pay anything to get his fans but some of the fans actually buy his merchandise. He’s made the headlines on several newspapers and can expect to get sponsorship deals along the way. Even in the worst case he’d end up paying a few hundred liters of gasoline and some other minor costs along the way.
Based on the assumption that his almost month-long journey is sort of summer holiday road trip that he anyway would’ve done with his family. In matter of weeks he has become the best-known excavator entrepreneur in the country.
Which campaign would you rather do for your company?
There’s a page called Fanilista for Finnish fan pages where you can see what works and what doesn’t. It isn’t up to date, but you’ll get the idea. Very few companies have managed to do anything of value.
Posted in Daily entries
Tagged audi finland, facebook, fanilista, fans, kaivurimies, marketing
It was already in February when I got involved with this project. I was immediately interested as I saw the ecological and social perspectives involved.
As a team member I am in charge of cooperation. That includes companies, authorities and charities, among others. I started the project by interviewing some of these main interest groups.
Early on it became clear that customer dissatisfaction is very common among the existing customers in the market we’re targeting. Companies refuse to outsource these services because there is no one on the market they would like to cooperate with.
From the environmental perspective the current situation doesn’t make sense. Tons of perfectly good products are thrown away by companies in all parts of the distribution chain. People who try to use this system like it’s intended are ruthlessly abused and end up paying for nothing.
Remote services and lacking information between different locations are also challenges that the current market is facing. You really have to make an effort to go and do something you could do in just a few clicks on your web browser.
A nation-wide service that combines all the actors in this industry and creates a new communicating platform for them is really necessary.
Today’s blogger Tiina Aulanko does marketing of ethical and ecological products.
There are millions of millionaires in the world and they all have their own money-making method. I was recommended to familiarize myself with the teachings of one of them, namely Brendon Burchard.
His teachings have several touch-points to what I do.
You can get an excellent overview of Burchard’s life and ideas by checking out his 90-minute Experts Academy Webinar. To summarize here are the bits and pieces that I agree with:
The slick 90-minute presentation has its pros but also its cons. The actual relevant content is really limited. The whole show has like 15 minutes of stuff that isn’t obvious or irrelevant. To top that off, the last 30 minutes of the his video is basically just hype-marketing his program. Needless to say, it still worked.
800 people paid $2,000 just to join his program, that’s 1.6 million dollars right there.
What should we learn from this?
At least that it doesn’t matter even if your message is 80 % rubbish. If that rubbish doesn’t scare people off, you have a chance of finding someone to follow you just for the other 20 %.
What do you think? Why is Burchard so successful in what he does? Is he ripping people off or actually creating more value than his services cost?
Posted in Daily entries
Tagged brendon burchard, expert, internet, marketing, million, millionaire, money
I attended today an event in Otaniemi called New Wave 2010. This event was about entrepreneurship, new ideas, pitches, keynote speakers and free catering.
One of the speakers was Riku & Tunna from Madventures. The high point of their speech for me was when Riku presented a story he had read from a blog. So my blog is officially read by at least one Finnish TV celebrity.
This is obviously a positive thing
What’s even better is that I’m currently getting a stable flow of readers. Over 300 people each day are interested in what I have to say. And my readers are doing most of the marketing effort.
When writing this post there was still $88,740 left in the marketing budget that I presented on Day 4. One guy already thought of working full time just linking my blog instead of getting a job.
Compared to having a random job just for money, I’m certain that linking my blog is more profitable. If someone really wants to do this full time, I recommend you keep your eyes constantly open for ideas of your own. You could build both your own net presence and link to my blog at the same time.
And after my project was over, you’d still have your own personality left. That is something no money can buy.
Posted in Daily entries
Tagged entrepreneurship, event, ideas, marketing, pitch, publicity, viral
How to Make a Million Before 30 
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