Blog Writing
The purpose of a blog is to establish you as the authority in your field. They are not for sales pitches or case stories or news articles (all of which should be presented elsewhere on your web site). Blogs provide your prospects and clients with expert, objective information about issues and opportunities common to your marketplace. If you sell trade show exhibits, for example, your blog should include stories about the design, fabrication, use, potential problems and ultimate impact of these products. Readers will return to your blog again and again because it provides information and perspective they can use - and can't get anywhere else. That positions you as the expert, the company they will turn to when it's time to buy something.
Check out my sample blog about communicating competitive advantage: http://www.brianefaulkner.com/blog
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The Produce Merchant Blog:
(for a client selling paper produce bags) Is Aroma Power the Next Produce Merchandising Frontier? When a customer walks into your produce department, the first thing to hit them may be the sheer volume of fresh fruits and vegetables to choose from. Not to mention the tremendous variety, more in some stores, less in others. As their eyes sweep over the artfully displayed colors and shapes, their brain goes into gear. More specifically, the limbic part of the brain cranks up. It’s the oldest part of our thinking machine, the seat of taste, emotion and memory. “That’s why we form such strong attachments to things that smell or taste good,” writes perfumer Mandy Aftel in Aroma, her 2004 book with two-star Michelin chef Daniel Patterson. You don’t taste with your mouth so much as you taste with your brain, she says. From time to time The Produce Mer-chant has wondered whether enough attention is given to the aromatic aspect of fresh produce merchandising. It seems odd, almost counter intuitive, that produce departments should smell neutral vs. alive with aroma. The A&P where my family shopped when I was a kid had a fruit salad smell. Even the veggies smelled like the country. No matter where you were in the store, your mind always led you back to produce. |
 Image © by Brian E. Faulkner
During recent conversations with Lowes Foods execs about their re-branding strategies, CMO Michael Moore mentioned how “the notion of somatic markers, memories embedded in your psyche are triggered by the five senses ... like a song that puts you right back in a period of time … or an aroma.”
The Produce Merchant believes there’s a distant memory of country life that may lie dormant within all of us, just waiting for a cue to awaken it. It could be as simple as the sight of peaches in crisp white totes that reminds you of your grandparents’ farm or that produce stand your family frequented so many years ago (or even last week). “Without the ability to smell. take in aroma, you can’t truly taste food,” says perfumer Aftel. Somatic marketing takes advantage of that by connecting experiences with memory - essentially, tasting something in your mind before you eat it. |
Carlos Huber, founder of luxury perfume line Arquiste, notes that scents are always at play in a meal (or when thinking about a meal). He, along with Artel, even suggests using flavor extracts and natural essences from flowers, herbs and fruits when cooking to entice our senses. But nothing entices our senses more than produce – visually and aromatically. That is, if we choose to address the nose as well as the eyes in our merchandising.
“New crop apples, first of the season peaches, bins of Athena cantaloupes, pumpkin patches -- all become the visual and aromatic cues of each new season,” says Richard McKellogg, Lowes Foods' director of produce/floral sales. “Part of what we try to hold ourselves accountable to (and we still aren’t there yet) is creating all those five senses and bringing them to life,” says CMO Moore. “The smells you smell when you come in the store, the look and feel of the store -- all of that needs to come alive.” So, next time the aroma of coffee brewing or bread baking suddenly makes you want some in the worst way, think of your produce department. The missing ingredient just might be aroma and the memories it triggers. But, then again, who needs aromatics when you’re selling the real thing? © by Brian E. Faulkner |
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Blog for Church Renovation Client:
Think Like Disney. Have you ever visited a home where the front yard was a showplace and the backyard was … just the opposite? It’s disconcerting. And puzzling. Why would someone bother to create perfection out front and toss weeds and junk out back? You'd think they had no windows on that side of their house! Reminds me of some churches: gorgeous sanctuary, modern fellowship hall and a lovely parlor, the place where prospective new members are received and often get their first impression. And then there are the Sunday school classrooms, with frayed curtains, yellowed and cracked light fixtures and a look suggesting they’d had no serious attention since before Ike was president. Never mind the children’s area, which looks like an afterthought and doubles as a storeroom. Some years ago Barna Group research found that some churches were successful at attracting people but less successful at keeping them. Because something was missing, All too often, would-be members moved on in search of whatever that was. |
 Image copyright by Brian Faulkner
Perhaps the programming didn’t meet their expectations. But maybe … just maybe … the Sunday school rooms were depressing. Or the nursery had more than enough space to store paper towels and folding chairs but not enough room to properly care for their children, who were expected to be neither seen nor heard during worship, relegated instead to a cheerless room in need of TLC.
Sort of like that thoughtless back yard. In 30-plus years of church renovation work, we’ve seen lots of situations like that, where significant investment was made in the public face of worship while more private areas were essentially ignored.. It's as if the folks who were attracted to the church “up front” were not expected to notice (or perhaps even care about) what goes on “out back”. As the Disney organization says so well, "Everything speaks." |
Disneyland is tidy to perfection – squeaky clean, like it might have looked on opening day in the summer of 1955.
If you could visit the service areas that Disney “guests” never see, I'll bet you’d find the same tidiness. At Disneyland and Disney World, everyone and everything is on-stage. “Disneyland is a work of love,” Walt Disney once said. But more than any other institution on Earth – more than Disney, more than any public attraction anywhere, the Church is (or should be) a work of love. And when the more utilitarian parts of our church buildings look less like love and more like neglect, the Message we’re trying to convey to the world suffers. “Whatever you do, do it well,” Walt once said. “Do it so well that when people see you do it they will want to come back and see you do it again and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.” And to that, all we can say is “Amen!” © by Brian E. Faulkner |
A Mercedes by Another Name
While researching origin of the current Mercedes-Benz tagline, I was reminded how close the car came to being called something else, at least here in America. Were it not for a promising young man’s tragic illness, Mercedes may have been called by a name that had nothing to do with automobiles, a name already well established worldwide by the time Gottlieb Daimler rolled out his high-speed internal combustion-powered automobile in 1886. (Carl Benz created his car during that same year, but the two businesses didn’t come together as Daimler-Benz AG until 1926.) In addition to automobiles, Daimler built engines for boats and industrial applications. That caught the eye of one William Steinway, scion of the famed piano family. Young Steinway was convinced he could sell Daimler’s engines in the United States and so acquired the rights to make and market them for use in such things as cream separators, sewing machines, pumps, ventilating fans, printing presses and other applications that required a single-cylinder stationary engine. On October 6, 1888, the Daimler Motor Company was organized in New York, where Steinway & Sons already had been in business for 35 years. In 1893, Steinway experienced Daimler’s “motor carriage” for himself. Driven by his vision of a motorized America, the piano impresario set about developing his own automobile, one more adapted to American road conditions (he thought Daimler's car too light for the "rough cobblestone streets in this country"). |
“The cars which we intend to produce for the American market will be capable of carrying between two and four people and will be driven by engines with between 2½ and 3½ hp,” Steinway told a newspaper reporter in 1895. “Each car will have four different speed settings: 3½, 6, 9, and 14 miles per hour.”
However, this forward-thinking man’s dream was not to be. He died at age 35 after a stubborn period of undiagnosed illness (probably tuberculosis). By that time he’d invested a frustrating amount of additional capital in the car company to offset its continuing losses, so it’s likely he would have pulled out anyway. After William’s death, Daimler Motor Company’s holdings, including a factory built on Steinway’s land, was sold to newly organized Daimler Manufacturing Company, which in 1905 produced an “American Mercedes” based on the German model. This car was on the market for only eight years before its factory was destroyed by fire. So had William Steinway lived and helped Daimler Motor Company overcome its financial problems, the American Mercedes just might have been called a Steinway, Which probably would have worked out fine, because both brands exemplify the best in their categories to this day. "Best" is subjective, of course, but one way of measuring it is by customer demand. Consider this: Steinway & Sons instruments are the pianos on which the overwhelming number of concert artists choose to perform – or aspire to perform - for year after year after year, as they have since the late nineteenth century. A statistic like this has a way of putting teeth in one's claim to excellence! Steinway's claim to excellence has a similar pedigree. William’s father, Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, emigrated to New York City from Germany around 1850, founded his business in a Manhattan loft, changed his name to Henry Steinway and set a quality standard that has endured through successive generations. His maxim was “Build the best piano possible. Sell it at the lowest price consistent with quality." |
Although the company has passed through a series of different owners since it was sold to CBS in 1972, Steinway & Sons remains perched at the top of the piano performance hierarchy, is the brand to which other fine pianos are most often compared. The company now is owned by American hedge fund manager John Paulson, a long-time admirer of its products. His stated goal is to assure Steinway & Sons’ “continuing greatness.” Henry and William clearly would have agreed on that.
The most recent Mercedes-Benz tagline also reflects the philosophy of its founder, as well as the quality bedrock on which the brand stands as it moves deeper into the 21st century. You may recall the TV spot where Gottlieb Daimler nods off at his desk and dreams about the Mercedes-Benz of the future, with its now-familiar technology and style. As Daimler is awakened by a lovely assistant, we see a handwritten phrase scratched on the notepad beside him. It is today's tagline, underlined with a flourish: The best or nothing. Though Mercedes-Benz has experienced some quality issues in recent years (not unlike Steinway), the brand is still held in high esteem, as evidenced by frequent references to the “Mercedes of this” and the “Mercedes of that” as marketers of other high-end products compare their offerings to the car with the three pointed star. “In the end, all any of us has is our good name,” a Mercedes ad once declared. That’s true of Mercedes-Benz and true of Steinway. The two vaulted brands that nearly became kissin’ cousins a hundred-odd years ago have prospered -- and will continue to prosper, in no small part, because of the quality foundation put in place by their founders. © by Brian E. Faulkner Read this post and 100+ other samples here: www.brianefaulkner.com/blog/a-mercedes-by-another-name |