Selling by Stagedooring

Builders of products have a different star power than actors hired as expo booth staffers.

The sensory experience of even a day in New York City can spark ideas in any marketer’s mind, and what better source of inspiration than a live performance. However, it’s hard to sit and watch a Broadway show with the incessant chatter of questions in one’s mind, especially when one can’t have them answered instantly. While the many unanswered questions occasionally got in the way of complete immersion in the experience of a brilliant show, it was what occurred after the play that got me thinking about trade shows as performative art.

As everyone spilled out of the theater late in the night, I saw another line forming on a side street, of audience members, playbills in hand. For the theater-novice like me, playbills are like a show guide. You can learn about the actors who are characters in the play. The protocol is to review their pictures on the playbill to know what the actors look like in real life, so when they walk out that stage door in everyday attire, they are still recognizable for that must-have selfie.

Since lines are meant to be joined without question to make the most of life, I got to watch up-close the hero-worship that the actors enjoyed. I observed how delighted the members of the audience waiting in the line were to chat with the artistes. There was the banter, the autographing of the playbill, followed by a selfie. Apparently, there’s a word for it: stagedooring.

That brings me to the topic at hand. Trade show exhibitors can learn from Broadway.

At a trade show in Washington DC, I passed by a booth that featured models in factory overalls. At a trade show in another industry in Austin, TX, there were no actors or models, just industry professionals who had compounded decades of work and acquired deep domain expertise. In both instances, there was a certain star power. However, in the case of actors and models, the products or brand weren’t the main attraction. Therein lies a lost opportunity on many fronts.

Steve Jobs and his team had their signatures etched into the Macintosh mold because they were considered artists. How about arranging stagedooring to meet these artists? A company could showcase its craftspeople or designers at its trade show exhibit alongside products or product imagery. Besides a product brochure, pass around a playbill. Allow your customers the chance to learn about your products from those who manifested them. Encourage your designers and makers to obtain firsthand feedback and seek suggestions. Offer autographs, banter and selfies at your booth.

The exposure is definitely not for the faint of heart, nor for the slim of budget, and certainly not for an industry with a culture of talent-poaching by competitors. Still, it’s tempting because showcasing that kind of inhouse star-power and the consequent visible hero-worship can do wonders, both, for a brand, and its creators.

Selling Delayed Gratification

Clairvoyance is a hard sell without something to show but hops of faith sustain a venture.

In an age of instant gratification, impatience and distraction, consumers swim against the tide of noise to fish for signal. How then does a marketer attract a following and retain the interest of early adopters for an offering that won’t show results for a while?

For a product that takes years to manifest, building a brand becomes mission critical. Convincing early adopters to keep faith requires visible milestones worthy of celebration along the way to delivering on the brand’s promise, like med schools which ship out a ‘Certificate of Admission’ after an emailed offer.

Imagine a product, perfecting which, takes generations like the Sagrada Família in Barcelona that is expected to be completed in 2026, after 144 years. How does a brand that is years ahead of its time develop the stamina to stay the course until the market recognizes its value?

A few years back I had the opportunity to design a summer workshop for middle-schoolers on developing an entrepreneurial mindset. Unlike Kumon or SAT prep, such alternative programs take multiple years to bear fruit and a different level of patience in the customer. Alternative learning works when the environment extends home, which makes it a family affair. Expectations that 11-year-olds will go into launch mode without figuring out what can make them self-motivated was a challenge. Usually, about half-way in the duration of the workshop one could see parents’ complete buy-in. It still required a leap of faith on the part of the parents.

What does selling delayed gratification look like, especially for a product that takes a long time to yield results, or a tough training or certification program? For an alternative education program that isn’t like SAT prep where one can see measurable results after each practice test there are lessons to be learned from horticulturists who must sell a small bag of dirt promising a flowering plant, or universities that promise future professional success. Let’s break them down.

·       Strength in numbers: External validation needs a community of believers lined up to cheer participants along their long arduous path like the cheering crowds lining a marathon route.

·       Validation milestones: In learning and development programs, milestones like completing market surveys or interviews of industry stalwarts provides intermittent feedback and reinforcement that encourages participants to sense progress.

·       Celebrate micro success: Recognize success as soon as the first plant yields flowers or the first student has a story worth sharing, with a reward or a social media re-post.

·       Foster peer-support: Remove hurdles for customers to share their progress with one another.

·       Gather multi-generational audiences: A multi-generational gathering with successful alumni helps current participants to keep faith with a long-term view. Hence, user conferences.

As many of the alumni will say, in the end it all works out. However, entrepreneurs and investors need more patience than what they expect of their customers for products with long gestation periods.

What’s in a nametag after all?

Getting the name tag right is the linchpin of a successful conference.

As another conference season gets underway and event planners go through their checklist of important things to take care of, I suspect, somewhere at the bottom of their list lies the chore of printing the lowly nametag.

The purpose of the time, money and effort of going to a conference ranges from the nostalgic college-time pursuit of pub crawls to the pursuit of learning about new products and continuing education credits. Across these various goals the common thread remains the human connections, that get choreographed and managed by how an event is structured.

There are conferences where the human connection is designed to be casual and not professional. You walk away having met seven Timothy’s and five Tammy’s, not knowing who's who or what role they play in the industry. In the theater that is a business conference, what’s missing is a simple way to learn about someone you meet, learn about their industry experience, and leave with an exchange of new knowledge, a new business lead or a new opportunity. Personal identities and stories are how one makes friends in an industry. It is how one gets known in an industry.

That is why the lowly nametag is not to be taken lightly. Until AR glasses become the norm, where someone you meet is instantly identified by your eyeglasses, the name tag is key. The current trend of name tags showing only the first name in large font is useless except for the barista at the café to announce that your order is ready. Effective networking requires learning about a stranger quickly and getting down to business.

Avoid excessive white space on a conference badge. The tiny real estate on a badge is like a billboard you pass by at 30 miles an hour. It must give a snapshot of who the person is in the context of the industry so that attendees can network judiciously. Less time trying to figure out if we can help each other, and more time helping each other. Conference badges that make me scan a QR code to drop a contact into my phone should be more thoughtfully designed to add context, so I can identify whom I met at which conference. Last, but not the least, the conference badge must be printed on the back and front so that no matter which way it dangles, the attendee’s identity isn’t hidden.

In a world of AI agents, in-person events are the last sanctuary for human connections in business settings. The only way to preserve the sanctity of that human interaction is to have nametags that tell a conference delegate’s story – at a mere glance. 

Imposter Packaging

Personal care product packaging that evokes emotions associated with popular foods and beverages may not hold water.

You reach for those bars of soap and sniff on them, and they remind you of your favorite foods – enough to want to take a bite. There are liquid soaps filled in cartons which at a glance look like fruit juices. I recently spotted a brand of shaving cream labeled as ‘Coffee Shaving Cream’ that is probably trying to find appeal among the caffeinated.

It’s the real-world equivalent of click-bait, gimmicks in the appearance and other sensory aspects of a product such as fragrances, shapes and colors. While they might catch one’s eye in a store, they risk not being taken seriously. They also may be an accident away from being abandoned or becoming a legal or public relations nightmare, no matter what the fine print on the package says.

What can marketers learn from such imposter packaging? There are probably many unwritten commonsense rules in product differentiation through packaging and their sensory experience. Let us consider a few.

1. If a product that’s not meant for ingesting can be mistakenly consumed as a drink or food item because of its packaging, placement or appearance on a retail store shelf, tell your designers to not go there with their design. The color of liquids in clear bottles is equally important – absolutely do not make it look like a popular drink, and hope that your customer is not color-blind.

1. Do not assume that all your customers will read and understand labels on your clever packaging. Task your designer to come up with graphics, signs and symbols to communicate warnings or usage instructions on the packaging. Run your designs by children – they have a refreshing way of looking at the world without biases. Show the design to the elderly; they have seen too much of the world. Find a happy medium between those two opinions.

1. If you want to differentiate your product, create a unique design for your packaging that becomes your brand’s signature. Do not cut corners by using milk cartons to package soaps, chemicals and oil-based products. Not only is that deceptive to the customer of a soap, but also disappointing for the connoisseur of milk or juices.

1. One way to differentiate your packaging is to make it easy to be opened by arthritic customers with perhaps a self-contained opening tool, and child-proofed where needed.

1. Make art that doubles as packaging so customers will covet it. Make it reusable for multiple purposes so that empty packages do not end up in landfills. Give your packaging a life beyond the expiration of the product it carries and your return on branding investment will improve dramatically.

If you are in the business of selling non-food products that smell like popular foods, consider adding a warning label for your customers: “This product may cause hunger pangs in those you meet. For best outcomes, avoid meetings before lunch hour.” 

Sounds that sell

 

Making sure that a product sounds as good as it works can set a brand apart.

“I just hate the grinding sound their instruments make,” said a teen after her recent visit to the dentist. Even if they work beautifully, machines can evoke negative emotions merely by the way they sound. It makes me wonder if the fear of going to the dentist can be alleviated simply by finding a way to muffle or substitute the harsh sounds that dental tools make.

Some machines make no or low sound. No sound isn’t always good. Electric cars or the hybrid cars that automatically switch over to electric mode are guilty of silently creeping up behind pedestrians and startling them, especially in parking garages. To compensate for their relative silence, such vehicles need brighter headlamps or fake sounds to alert unsuspecting passersby.

Sounds are a necessary and reassuring part of user-experience for some products. Just as grandma used to check on grandpa whenever he stopped snoring in the middle of the night to make sure his heart was still ticking, the complete silence of certain machines or products can make users wonder if they are actually working. We need the washing machine to hum, but only gently.

Sound, or its absence is a tool that can be used for branding in such a way that it does not annoy or scare users, unless it’s animatronics at a theme park whose sound is a feature.

It is common for realtors to play on a buyer’s sense of smell using baked cookies during open houses. Then there was the ‘For Sale By Owner’ property with the sound of piano playing on loop during showings. I do not think it was the main reason the home eventually sold, but it did create a pleasant and elegant ambience as prospective buyers walked in. The music also patched those spells of awkward silence between agents and buyers at showings. The music enhanced the brand image of his home.

We recognize the brand of electronic devices from their signature sounds when they are switched on. I suspect the idea was borrowed from the movies. Netflix and HBO (now Max) effectively use distinctive musical tones to build anticipation. Intel commissioned a composer for the tone which plays when an Intel-based computer starts up. How can one forget the iconic sound of a Nokia phone.

A starting sound is a great way for any product manufacturer to create a positive feeling about a product. Imagine your oven or vacuum cleaner playing a few musical notes when switched on. Retain the blinking lights for the hearing-impaired.

The one place where machines could avoid intimidating sounds, is in hospital rooms. Their ominous sounds certainly don’t help in healing patients. Whenever hospital machines make beeping sounds with a cadence, the sound of machines can be the sound of music. If it’s cost-effective, why not make your brand worthy of a jig?

[ Photo by Quang Tri Nguyen on Unsplash ]

Comicon as a Catalyst

 

Other than serendipity, there are few shortcuts to making a brand beloved, but there’s a catalyst.

There are too many characters in the world of comics, animation movies and anime to track, so observing the crowds outside a Comic Con (or Comicon) is usually a guessing game for me. My ignorance notwithstanding, the strong sense of belonging that a Comicon fosters among its attendees leaves me in wonderment. After all, it seems like a lot of effort (and pocket money) for teens to buy or make costumes, travel, stay at a hotel and spend two days in character.

The fervor at Comicon ought to be the envy of, and inspiration for, every business organization that aspires for longevity and timelessness of its brand.

I do not know if the pair in Ketchup and Mustard costume was paid by Heinz; perhaps Colonel Sanders wasn’t an attendee but just a walking ad for KFC. However, both were extremely popular.

To see attendees dressed up as their favorite comic characters or to see them don the persona of their favorite anime characters is fascinating from an industry perspective. The conference naturally begins to feel like a carnival even before one walks in. For the conference organizers, keeping attendees entertained is simply not an issue. Attendees aren’t camera shy. They instantly get into character and pose for other attendees to take pictures. The playfulness in every human interaction is infectious. The various vendors who have set up their exhibition booths also seem to have fun while also doing business. Nobody seems to notice or wince at the prices of the tee shirts and stickers, but I digress.

Comicon held a powerful lesson for marketers.

There is immense value in personification of a brand. A personified brand finds it easier to become a part of pop culture. There is value in making a brand’s perception as a playful and friendly one among the next generation. It is in their future (as consumers, employees, influencers, shareholders, or suppliers) that a brand must find a place.

Personification of a brand is easier when manifested as a mascot.

In any college football game, there is the official mascot that engages in goofy acts to get a cheer from the crowd. It gives the college’s brand a distorted but relatable human form. Commonly seen in tire industry commercials and in fast food brands, a mascot helps memory recall.

The holy grail for any brand is to be entrenched in the collective memories of families for generations. Seeing personified commercial brands parading around at Comicon is a clear signal that a brand has become a household name. That lowers various costs such as the cost of customer acquisition and the cost of hiring a workforce that embodies the brand’s values.

A mascot mingling at every Comicon might be the catalyst that a brand needs to start turning iconic. More importantly, mascots can be birthed by any company irrespective of its industry.

Michelin for Barbers

Haircuts could be more science than art.

Every few weeks I get to reincarnate myself. I sit in a swivel chair, they pull up my ‘profile’, read out some numbers, and get to work sculpting my hair. After a while, I don my glasses and look in the mirror for damage control measures against the perceptions with which I’ll leave those I meet over the next few weeks.

I wish that besides reading out trimmer guard sizes they would also have a silhouette of my head. I even tried showing screen shots of a TV interview where I felt the cameras had captured two angles of my best haircut, yet no barber was able to replicate that.

We live in a world that transacts on a foundation of perceptions. You can choose the clothes you wear. You can choose the kind of smile you want to wear and where you can (and cannot) smile. You can practice your speaking style. You may even have the foresight to choose the right kind of vehicle to drive in because you are often judged by what you drive. However, the way you wear your hair is rarely in your control.

First impressions tend to last, and leaving a critical component of first impressions to chance seems shortsighted in an age where a realtor can virtually stage a home to help us visualize an empty room, a meteorologist can predict the weather for us, but hair stylists can’t predict or help us visualize the hair style they will deliver for us.

Haircuts are considered more art than science. Social media foments the image of a barber as an artist, and every head of hair as their canvas.

My grandfather had the same barber for years. The backyard barber, Gangaram got to decide how Grandpa must present himself to the world. His haircut used to be consistent month after month. Not everyone has the luxury of providing patronage to the same barber or hair stylist for a lifetime. Time available to spend on a barber’s chair is another constraint.

Just as the Michelin tire company created the Michelin ratings for restaurants, there may be an opportunity for, say, Monster ratings or LinkedIn ratings to create a rating system for barbers, rating them similar to Michelin – on quality, mastery of style and hair-styling techniques, personality of the barber, a balanced haircut, and consistency between visits.

When I observe how I can take a key and replicate it in a kiosk on a blank at the touch of a button, it makes me wonder if the haircut industry will embrace technology beyond having a scheduling app or an app to log the tools used by a stylist. Once a digital map of one’s head pre- and post-haircut is ready, it is probably a matter of time before we see a helmet-like device or kiosk pre-configured to give us that consistently perfect haircut. Meanwhile, that Monster-star or LinkedIn-star barber would work.

Small business, of medicine

 

If small businesses can surf on a community’s patronage, so can medical practices.

In a perfect world, physicians will attend to patients, give or prescribe medicines, and set the patients back on track to health. However, within the practice of medicine, lies the business of medicine. Learning how to navigate the business of medicine ultimately determines the success of a doctor and the satisfaction of the patient.

In the business of medicine, the principles of a profit-making business apply even though the care of fellow humans is best driven not by profit motive, but by altruism commonly associated with non-profit organizations. Non-profit is misunderstood as an endeavor that does need not profits. Even non-profits need to be profitable for self-sustenance.

Running a successful business (including the business of medicine) requires survival, and therefore, positive cash flow.

The challenge with being in the business of medicine is that doctors have fewer hours to spend healing patients. Electronic medical records software, if designed by patients, would have allowed for less staring into a computer by doctors and more eye contact with patients. When the initial or primary care of patients gets bogged down in systems it gives rise to a complex layer of administrative support. The success of a medical practice depends on both, bedside manners, and whether the administrative layer acts as a buffer for both, the doctors and patients, while removing bottlenecks in cash flow.

There may be business models worth exploring for certain service-based medical practices that entail low capital investment.

One model that comes to mind is that of a Chinese restaurant. Often, small towns across America have great Chinese restaurants thriving in a symbiotic relationship with the community they serve. The food is affordable, served hot and fresh, and they are open year-round, even on holidays. They accept cash payments, or for a little extra, credit cards. They probably have zero hurdles in their cashflow pipeline.

A good way to test the waters is in rural areas that could use more local doctors. If a rural medical practice is perceived as a small business that supports a community, and vice versa, whether with cash or in kind (assuming, comedian-ophthalmologist Dr. William E. Flanary’s YouTube alter ego Dr. Glaucomflecken’s skit on rural medicine is to be believed), there may indeed exist a viable patronage model for the small business of medicine. Perhaps, a thousand households in a community could directly fund and sustain a thriving medical practice. Noteworthy also, is renowned author-surgeon Dr. Atul Gawande’s description of a hospitalist in rural India who deftly and swiftly handles multiple medical issues of the local population, supported by the pharmacist across the street.

Such a local doctor could also use a small business’ marketing playbook and become a household name in a community.

The first step is for a community to accept the fact that a medical practice is in the business of doing good, but also one that must remain viable as a small business.

Picture credit: Photo by NCI on Unsplash

Selling Sleep

 

Picture credit: Elizabeth Lies on Unsplash

Mattress makers may be giving themselves reasons to lose sleep with their marketing.

They say a clear conscience guarantees sound sleep. I’ve seen laborers sleeping soundly on a piece of cloth spread across rocky surfaces after a day’s work in the hot sun. I have seen perfectly healthy people toss and turn on the plushest of mattresses. Sleep is complicated. Mattresses need not be.

Mattresses are getting commoditized, thus giving rise to brand marketing. Ever since mattresses started becoming brands, there seems to be a struggle for differentiation.

Mattress marketing is getting increasingly complex in its messaging. Some mattress brands emphasize how a mattress conforms to the contours of the human body on it. Some use the imagery of the spine and the risks to health from bad sleeping postures. Some brands sell shopping and shipping conveniences. Other brands highlight their product’s construction similar to how automobile tire companies try to sell their products based on superior technology and cross-sectional pictures. Mattress brands also wade into couples therapy territory with a tailored feel to each half of a mattress.

The more complex the messaging, the harder it becomes for a buyer to be surefooted about a mattress.

In other words, the more marketing dollars used to promote mattresses, the more complex the messaging gets, and the more difficult it will become for mattress companies to sell. The last thing that the greatest mattress companies want to deal with is the analysis paralysis of confused consumers.

From a consumer's point of view, some introspection might help mattress makers position themselves for a higher trajectory in marketing. Some questions might help.

Can a mattress manufacturer follow the model of Gilette’s razor blades? Innovate on the mattress toppers and accessories, something that can be changed out every few years with more innovative versions.

Can the mattress manufacturer reposition itself as a productivity tool? After all, a good night’s sleep is not the end but the means to an end; a good night’s sleep ensures a more productive day and a better quality of life.

Could home builders add mattresses and furniture to their offering because, after all, a mattress needs a bed, which in turn needs a room?

Can a mattress company create complementary product lines for incremental uses, from dorm rooms to sleeping under the stars, much like apparel brands that allow for mix and match combinations and accessories?

Can a mattress brand be positioned as a wellness product or a medical product?

Can a mattress manufacturer become a sleep-and-sensory-experiential offering instead of a one-off product sale?

Would it help a mattress manufacturer to strip away all the marketing noise about its value proposition and instead focus on stories of sleep deprivation? In sleep deprived cultures, would such messaging bring greater clarity about the need for the product and create brand gratitude?

Addressing these questions while crafting a marketing strategy might help mattress makers think bigger. After all, they are selling something precious and priceless – sound sleep.

The Slow Gym

 

Physical therapists can transform the fitness industry with preventative services.

“You’d be surprised at the number of patients I see for injuries they sustained in a gym, even with a personal trainer,” said the physical therapist who underwent years of training in the medical field and is considered a purist for relying more on hands than on equipment to treat injuries. After an injury while dancing at an Indian wedding, I not only gained a new gait, but also insights into the business of physical therapy.

The facility was equipped very much like a gym, but largely underutilized. This was a physical therapy clinic, but it was also a business. The physical therapist had to worry about marketing, cash flows, and a lease, alongside customer satisfaction.

Another physical therapist at a university, a Ph.D., didn’t have those worries. She brought in research papers to explain how the body works to her college athlete patients. Yet another physical therapy office had mostly elderly patients. For all practical purposes, the place looked like a busy gym in slow motion due to its rehabilitative purpose – a slow gym. Slow gyms, like Slow TV, the Norwegian television channel which broadcasts several hours of views from a running train, serve a niche audience. A physical therapy center must go beyond its niche audience.

Typically, one thinks of a physical therapist only for rehabilitation after an injury or surgery; there is a stigma attached. They don’t permeate popular culture, something that personal trainers have done since the Jan Fonda era. Peloton gets celebrity trainers to keep its subscribers hooked. Social media’s audio-visual convenience allows individual physical trainers to build a massive following. Chris Heria has close to 5 million followers. We even see solo fitness instructors at parks leading small groups of followers. ‘Future’, an app, makes markets for personal trainers allowing for subscribers to get one-on-one lessons via live video. Subscribers’ progress gets tracked on a complimentary Apple Watch.

The market seems primed for physical fitness. Viral marketing tools abound. Gyms allow us to pay a subscription fee to feel less guilty about not working out regularly. Physical trainers push their sweaty customers to the sound of pulsating music.

In the midst of this fitness frenzy, physical therapy practitioners are left behind. Even when exercising the wrong way causes injuries, chiropractors get a call, but physical therapists remain an afterthought.

Physical therapists must eliminate the stigma of being something for the injured or the elderly and expand into physical fitness by promoting preventative maintenance of human mobility. Physical therapists could try:

• Subscription based models for access to a physical therapy expertise.
• Training camps for personal fitness instructors.
• Extended hours to utilize the capacity of a physical therapy center after patient hours.
• Partnerships with gyms and fitness instructors as distribution channels or affiliates.
• Building a cool personal brand online.

Lastly, advocacy groups must make slow gym into a movement by enlisting the help of athletes, soldiers, and movie stars – maybe even Jane Fonda.