Category: Marketing

How Domino’s Turns Your Cupboard Into a Billboard Cover

How Domino’s Turns Your Cupboard Into a Billboard

Nik

You look up from your laptop. 7:13 PM. Damn! Work ran late again. It’s gonna be pizza tonight. Where should you order from? Hmm…Domino’s!

You put in your order, and, 27 minutes later, you take that comfortably warm box we all love more than Christmas presents from the delivery man’s hands.

You sit down at your kitchen table, crack it open, and have yourself a delicious slice. As you chew on some crispy pepperoni, you start to ponder: “Why did I go for Domino’s? And how did I come up with it so fast?”

The answer hits you like lightning. The cheese almost falls out of your mouth. “No! Those clever bastards!”

Staring at you, right from the spice basket in the middle of the table, is a little white packet. On one side, it says “Oregano Seasoning.” Across the other, in bold blue letters, your fate was spelled all along: Domino’s Pizza.

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The #1 Pattern All Writers Must Break Cover

The #1 Pattern All Writers Must Break

Nik

If you design a cockpit based on the average pilot body, not a single pilot will fit in it. Just ask the US Air Force.

In 1950, they measured 4,063 pilots on over 140 dimensions. Then, they took just the top ten (like height, sleeve length, etc.), and designed a cockpit that’d fit anyone who lands in the middle 30% on each of those dimensions.

Unfortunately, no pilot did. In The End of Average, Todd Rose tells the story. Even when they reduced the number of dimensions to just three, less than 3.5% of all pilots would fit in the resulting cockpit. The conclusion? “There was no such thing as an average pilot.”

That’s the problem with average: It’s calculated, not real.

How long is an average blog post? Five minutes? Three? Seven? It doesn’t matter. “Long isn’t the problem. Boring is,” Seth says.

You don’t always talk for exactly one minute. Sometimes, you talk for five. Sometimes for 20. Why should writing be any different?

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4 Ways To Not Write an Introduction Cover

4 Ways To Not Write an Introduction

Nik

The number one thing stopping people from reading your article is its title. If they don’t open the wrapper, all the effort you put into the gift is lost.

The number two thing is your introduction. In the cruel obstacle course of “hurdles to jump over so people will read my writing,” the introduction is one of the most neglected, most easily dismissed elements.

In turn, a lot of articles are dismissed by readers, leaving authors scratching their heads, wondering what they did wrong. “My title scored 78 in the analyzer! I picked a relevant image! Why aren’t people reading?!”

They’re not reading because you wasted their time. You just waited to do it in the intro, and it made them even angrier than a bad title. Now, they clicked on it for nothing. They unwrapped the gift, and it sucked.

It’s easy to let clutter sneak into your introductions. It happens to all writers, and we don’t always catch it before it’s too late.

Most of the time, bad introductions are the result of laziness rather than lack of skill or imagination. The mistake would have been easy to spot, if only we’d made the time to look for it. We chose to ignore it. We were in a hurry. So we tossed our bird out the window, hoping it could fly with a broken wing.

Sometimes, a miracle happens. But if we don’t want to spend our lives scraping dead birds off the street, we better learn to respect our readers’ time.

Below are four instructive examples of how to not start an introduction.

These before-and-afters show how we try to fight clutter at Better Marketing. All authors agreed to be listed as examples in advance. We’re grateful they write for us, and we hope this study will serve them and others well.

Let’s do away with bad introductions.

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The Most Generous Tweet of 2019 Cover

The Most Generous Tweet of 2019

Nik

On March 9, 2019, Billy By tweeted his frustration out to his followers — all 20 of them.

One week earlier, his dad had finally opened the donut shop he’d named after his son: Billy’s Donuts. Every day, he woke up at 2 AM to make fresh donuts.

The cute little store near Houston, Texas, opened every morning at 5, but so far? No customers for the grand opening.

Billy took a few pictures of the store front, the yellow-themed interior, his dad behind the counter, and, of course, some freshly glazed, delicious looking donuts.

He tweeted them along with the simple truth: “My dad is sad cause no one is coming to his new donut shop.”

What happened next, no one could have expected. Not Billy and definitely not his dad (who didn’t even know what Twitter was).

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The Curse of American Airlines Cover

The Curse of American Airlines

Nik

Josh died in a car accident. He was 15 years old. Over 1,000 people attended his funeral. Ten of them worked at American Airlines.

Steven Rothstein, Josh’s father, didn’t work for the company. He was merely a valued customer. Maybe the most valued of all.

In the time following his son’s death, Steve would often call the airline — just to have someone to talk to. He’d walk to the gate, greet a dozen people along the way, and smile every time they greeted back.

Unlike many other communities Steve was a part of, American Airlines didn’t treat him like he was broken. They treated him “like a normal human,” his daughter Caroline Rothstein said in an article for Narratively, which provides most of the information for this post. Until, a few years later, they didn’t.

Some people don’t travel to be somebody. They travel because that’s who they are. Steven Rothstein is one of those people. When they took away his lifelong ticket, American Airlines didn’t just break a promise. They took away part of who he was.

This is the story of the AAirpass.

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How Apple Can Make You Buy Anything Cover

How Apple Can Make You Buy Anything

Nik

On January 27th, 2010, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad and, over the course of a single, 91-minute presentation, split the world right down the middle.

In an early review for The New York Times, acclaimed tech reviewer David Pogue wrote: “In 10 years of reviewing tech products for The New York Times, I’ve never seen a product as polarizing as Apple’s iPad.”

According to Pogue, opinions ranged from “This truly is a magical revolution” to “This device is laughably absurd,” with very little in between. “Those are some pretty confident critiques of the iPad — considering that their authors have never even tried it,” Pogue said.

And then, with nearly every expert slamming the iPad as unnecessary, unmarketable, and making tampon jokes about it, Apple did what Apple does — and sold 7.5 million units in the next six months, adding $5 billion in revenue to their bottom line from a product with basically no competition and no pre-existing market.

Ten years later, Apple has sold over 400 million iPads — enough to, in theory, put one into every American’s hands — and made $200 billion as a result.

What happened? How could all the experts be so wrong? And if they didn’t buy it, how could it have become such a success story?

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The Worst Rebrand in the History of Orange Juice Cover

The Worst Rebrand in the History of Orange Juice

Nik

In hindsight, it’s easy to see why Tropicana’s 2009 rebrand failed. Poor design choices, a messy, vague, esoteric theme, and — as often with these things — a complete disregard of common sense.

When Tropicana hired legendary ad agency Arnell in 2008, they surely didn’t expect that, after five months of design work, launch planning, and $35 million in marketing spend, they’d lose 20% of their revenue within a month — about $20 million total in missed sales. But that’s exactly what happened.

Less than 30 days after launch, they pulled the new design off the shelves and went back to the old one. Four years later, Arnell shut down — they had been in business for three decades.

Looking back, some of Arnell’s mistakes appear obvious. What do you think? They went from this…

Image via Brands & Films

…to this:

Image via Packaging Digest

Without even getting into the subjective topics of visual appeal and recognizability, some technical design flaws present themselves instantly.

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How to End an Email Cover

How to End an Email: Which Sign-Off Most Likely Leads to a Response?

Nik

For all the energy you put into your mails, you’re neglecting the one element that’s most crucial in determining whether you’ll receive a reply: the ending.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You’ve spent hours deliberating over your email subject line and its content. Will this word get them to open my message? Am I rambling? How can I get my request across in the most concise and considerate way?

You’ve worried about the first sentence, the second, and you’ve re-written both of them a dozen times. And then? Then you hit ‘Send’ without spending one thought on which words your recipient will read right before they decide if they’ll respond or not.

It’s easy to understand why your email’s subject line is all-important: If it doesn’t get the receiver to open your message, all hope is lost. Similarly, it’s clear that if you waste the first few seconds of someone’s attention, they won’t give you any more of it. What’s less obvious but also true is that if your email leaves a bad taste in someone’s mouth at the end, that person won’t reply.

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Don’t Remind Us of the Crisis in Every Article Cover

Don’t Remind Us of the Crisis in Every Article

Nik

Last week, my friend Brian asked for advice on a title. Two of his options were:

  1. How to Stay Focused During Lockdown
  2. The Granny Rule of Motivation

I told him to go with the second. After nearly a month of nothing but news related to the crisis, I have, quite frankly, grown sick of hearing about it. I can’t imagine I’m the only one.

Yes, we get it. The world has changed. We live in a new paradigm. We have to follow new rules. And we’re all stuck at home more than we’d like. As much as we wish it would, none of this will disappear as quickly as it has burst into our lives — and it’s about time we acknowledge it and move on.

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46 Strategies To Handle the Economic Fallout of COVID-19 Cover

46 Strategies To Handle the Economic Fallout of COVID-19

Nik

In an episode of How I Met Your Mother, Ted is facing a dilemma: his ex is en route to his wedding — and the bride doesn’t want her there.

When he asks his friend Lily for advice, she says: “You wait for the next crisis, you solve it, you’re a hero. Then you bring up the Robin thing, but this time, she’ll say yes.” When Ted intervenes with, “Yeah, but what if there’s no next crisis?” his friends break out in laughter. “She’s a bride. There will be a next crisis.” Four minutes later, that’s exactly what happens.

That’s the thing about crises: There’s always another one. Usually, right around the time we’ve forgotten the last one ever happened. That’s when it stings the most. We don’t control the nature of the crisis nor how much pain we’ll incur because of it — but we do control how we respond. We can pity ourselves, bury our heads in the sand, or we can do what Ted did: get excited about solving the challenge that lies ahead.

In our last big crisis in 2009, Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, shared a series of “Recession Thoughts” — actionable strategies to dig your heels in, get to work, and save your business or career. It’s a staccato of 46 poignant ideas, and today, I’d like to share them with you.

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