Making your Mark

Key elements for a lasting impression with your customers

This Week’s focus: Humour, Gimicks and Generally Horsing around

Ever seen what happens when a horse eats grass clippings? (All you gardeners note this down). It isn’t pretty, and it’s a common problem faced by many horse owners. My first brush with the gooier side of this particular problem was when I was twelve years old. I’d had my pony, (Nick, or ‘Grumpy Bugger’ for short), a month and I was excited.

I was proudly walking Nick home for a bath (which basically meant I got wet, stomped on and covered in horsehair) when I spied our next door neighbor; an elderly nun that we all knew as Sister Joan, and the sweetest lady for miles around. So, naturally, she had to be introduced.

I presented my boy, loudly pointing out the similarities in the colour of his hair and mine, his lovely mane and his pretty new halter. She nodded and smiled, tentatively reaching out to stroke his nose…

Nick chose this moment to sneeze. Not just any sneeze, the mother of all mothers of all sneezes. Sister Joan’s lovely white cardigan turned green. Why? Because approximately a kilo of green, grass clipping filled, sticky goo had impacted with it at high velocity. Pony1 to base, we have a direct hit.

On the upshot, Nick felt a lot better.

Protect unsuspecting members of the clergy! Recycle your grass clippings in the appropriate containers and don’t feed them to horses.

Nuns everywhere are depending on you.

Did that make you laugh?

I hope so, or I need a new party trick. The important thing is, if you’ve gotten this far, the story kept you interested. Why did it keep you interested? Because it made you laugh. It built a fundamental relationship with you – the audience – by letting you into my world and entertaining you. If you were a horse owner, wouldn’t you be interested in reading on? You might go on to read about how dangerous grass clippings are to horses, and start instructing the local gardeners to buy a compost bin and stop poisoning your precious babies. You might also refrain from introducing local clergy to your pets.

In business, there are key elements to success; A great service, a great product, fantastic people. But how do you get people to click on your site, to walk in the door, or to pick up the phone? It’s all in your marketing. And according to the fifty people we’ve been speaking to, it’s not about size, colour or sound. It’s all about humour.

Ever been to a foreign country where you can only stutter a few syllables of the local language, and even then you’re not sure if you’re asking for a taxi or insulting some one’s grandmother? You might notice that it doesn’t really matter what you say, once you’re laughing with the locals, you feel connected to them, more at home, and less likely to be unwittingly married to somebody's daughter.

At the hairdressers, notice how everyone gossips and jokes with you, the majority of their customers feel safer in the hands of some one with scissors when they’re joking about something entirely unrelated to the fact that a blade is now dangerously close to their scalp.

All of this is the crucial part of relationship building. Businesses, and more importantly the people that run them, do much better when they’re accessible, when they reach out to their market. Would you buy from some one who looked down their nose at you? Or some one who made no effort to stand out from the crowd? No, you buy from an equal.

One of the fastest and most entertaining ways to achieve this kind of bond with potential customers is humour.

There are very few cases where humour cannot be packaged to suit your target market, but for most of us, it’s a valuable tool, and the best thing is, it doesn’t cost anything more.

Here are some examples of great ad campaigns that used humour.

The Bugger Campaign

Ok, any kiwi will know this one. Toyota hit the jackpot. Your standard kiwi bloke bungles just about everything on the farm because he’s not yet figured out how powerful his new ute is, declaring that good old kiwi oath all the while.

For more than a year after the ad ran, people were recognising the ‘bugger ute’ and the ‘bugger ad’. Even now I see license plates, spare tyre covers, bumper stickers, all branded with that one symbol of kiwi culture. And Toyota has glued their product on to it.

The ‘Yeah Right’ Campaign

This one is a classic, another symbol of Kiwi culture, Tui is developing itself a proud history of hardcase advertising, delving right to the heart of your standard, laidback kiwi.

Everything can be taken with a grain of salt, and the Yeah Right Ads take the proverbial out of just about everything that could be considered pretentious.

The Speight’s Southern Man Campaign

Another fine example of Kiwi Ana, this time geared for the southern man, the adventures of a couple of cockies takin’ life slow and steady, with a can of speights firmly in hand. Like the Tui and Bugger Campaigns, the theme has spread far and wide, from billboards and commercials, to clothes, stickers and a range of weird promotional products.

The Point?

Customers feel more comfortable when they’re laughing, they’re having a good time, it brings you down from on high and makes you and your business accessible to the people you need to reach. It doesn’t have to be crude humour, it doesn’t have to be overly witty, it’s important that it matches up with your market.

There’s other ways to involve humour in your marketing and customer service, you can use Promotional Products, Competitions, and other forms of marketing. Try a few of the ideas below.

Promo Products

You could try putting a spin on standard promotional products with things like stressballs, money boxes and joke calendars. You could add some personality to your branded pens by adding a cute bauble on top. These items are great because not only are they fun, but they’re useful, and people keep them, they grow to associate that little giggle (or that snorting, knee slapping gauffaw that’s normally reserved for the after work drinks), with your name and logo. Why not get yourself a little mascot? Some cute little stress toy on the front counter and in your ads, give him a name, give him to your customers, they’ll remember him, and by proxy, you. If ever you wanted to make contact with your customers where it matters, this is the way to do it.

You can take a look at some great promotional products at www.premierpromoproducts.com

Jokes and Stories

One of the things I do to pass the time while I’m waiting for the doctor to poke, prod, proclaim me well and charge me fifty dollars, is read the jokes and cartoons they put up on the wall, it’s great, because it’s funny, and I don’t feel so bad about parting with money that really would have been better spent on that gorgeous new skirt I saw in town. My inbox is full of comics and jokes and funny stories, and I love it. I like it when people go out of their way to make me laugh, it shows that they’re willing to go the extra mile to keep me as a customer. Why not send out some jokes and quotes with your invoices and newsletters?

There are hundreds of jokes available at www.jokesgalore.com and www.siglets.com

The Personal Touch

Good reception staff are always smiling and quick to pick up on when a customer at the front desk wants to make a joke. It doesn’t matter if it’s actually funny, they laugh anyway, because laughing with some one builds a bond. When I deal with customers I often adopt a rueful sort of humour about the things my pets put me through, and a lot of customers identify with that because they have pets or children. If you start with a reserved style of humour and just feel out how people respond, you can soon have them thinking they’re your best customer. And since they’re the one standing in front of you, they are.

You can find more tips on great customer service at http://www.secretsofsuccess.com/customer/

So inject some humour into your business, and be nice to twelve year olds and ponies, they might be armed.

For tools, tips and secrets to help grow your business for a life worth living, take a look at joining our site at www.learning4ever.com

Wealth, Success, and Salvation from Gooey Grass Clippings,

-Bridget

Next Week: Unicyles, Foreigners and Car Breaking