In the old days, every “great” sales and marketing strategy had it’s foundation in a “PUSH” mentality. A business would manufacture products and then it would be up to the sales force to market or PUSH those products into the hands of consumers. It was the sales staff’s job to create demand. If a customer said, “No,” that was the cue to begin “pushing” for the sale.

If you need an example of “old school push marketing” sales mentality, look to the Big Three US Automakers. For years, Ford, Chrysler and GM have been churning out cars that no one wants to buy. (Read the WSJ “Three Vehicles Detroit Should Build“… I’m ready and waiting for the 7 passenger vehicle that gets 30 mpg!)

Contrast that with the “new school” approach which is based upon attraction as a sales and marketing strategy. Products and services are created with the CUSTOMER in mind. The customer is seeking solutions and the sales and marketing strategy is designed to PULL customers in and attract them to the business.

Starbucks is an outstanding example of “pull” marketing. Starbucks began with a simple “pull” principle: provide a place for freelancers and other home based business professionals a place to do business. Selling coffee was almost an after thought. (Read Dear Starbucks, I’m Coming!” for social proof.)

Attraction is all about focusing on the customer’s wants and needs and then packaging your products or services accordingly.

However, in attraction marketing, this process is turned upside down. Buyers come to sellers seeking ways to achieve GOALS… seeking ways to satisfy DESIRES and most importantly, seeking solutions to PROBLEMS.

When you focus on buyers GDP (Goals, Desires, Problems) then your marketing doesn’t have to push, push push. Instead, your marketing can pull or attract buyers. Buyers are coming to YOU instead of you chasing buyers.

Attraction Marketing isn’t for everyone. If you’re an “old school” salesman whose focus is exclusively on closing the present sale without any thought to building a customer RELATIONSHIP where that customer returns time and time again, then perhaps attraction marketing is not for you.

If however, you want to create a relationship with your customers so they come and buy from you time and time again, then Attraction Marketing is where you should invest your marketing efforts.

The book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results is all about creating attraction marketing campaigns for your small business.

POD stands for Print On Demand. Instead of printing thousands of copies of a book and hoping they sell, these publishers can print only the number of books that actually are sold. That’s a great business model, however Amazon has decided that the only POD books they want to sell on their site are the ones printed by their own POD service: Book Surge.

Angela Hoy is the publisher of the Writer’s Weekly which she uses to promote her POD publishing business, Booklocker.com. Last Friday, Angela launched a firestorm when she reported that Amazon is putting the squeeze on POD publishers.

FIRST MARKETING SECRET THAT AMAZON FORGOT: Customers are the life blood of any business.

Angela Hoy reports spending over $1500 with Amazon last year. Sure, that’s just a tiny drop of income in the Olympic sized pool of profits generated by Amazon… but she’s a customer none the less and their bullying tactics really rubbed her the wrong way. They’ve lost her as a customer… but wait … that brings us to Marketing Secret Number 2.

SECOND MARKETING SECRET THAT AMAZON FORGOT: A satisfied customer will tell 3 friends… a dissatisfied customer will tell 16.

In Angela’s case, she’s the editor of the largest ezine publication for freelance writers in the world, so instead of telling 16 friends she’s using her newsletter to tell over a hundred thousand. She’s ignited quite a firestorm.

THIRD MARKETING SECRET THAT AMAZON FORGOT: People hate doing business with a bully.

Apple’s agency recognized this secret when they created those memorable Mac vs PC spots. The Ladders.com also capitalized upon this marketing secret as well. Not only are these strong arm tactics not going to play well with POD authors… they’re not going to play well for MANY “regular” book buyers as well.

The firestorm ignited by this illustrates an important truth about the power of Web 2.0. While we are all seeking a way to ignite a firestorm like this to build POSITIVE buzz about a business… it seems that human nature tends to reserve such passionate “pass along” power to injustice that incites rage and indignation. It’s unfortunate, but the positive afterglow of a positive customer experience rarely inspires such a viral campaign.

Less than 48 hours after the newsletter went out, there were more than 60 online references to this story. Slashdot picked it up, so that number will increase.

In the spirit of Web 2.0, I’ve included a list of sites reporting this story. Feel free to grab the list below and add it to your own blog. If you want to add your post to the “cause”… the post a comment to this post. The more links to these posts… the more “traction” this cause will get.

• A New Amazon Mandate? Say it ain’t so, Jeff by Morris Rosenthal
• Amazon Forcing POD Publishers to Make a Hard Decision, Virtualbookworm
• Amazon Tightens Grip on Printing by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal
• Amazon Tightens Noose on Print-On-Demand Publishers; Insists They Use Company’s Own Service by Rafat Ali, The Washington Post
• Amazon to Force POD Publishers to Use BookSurge by Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly
• Amazon changes rules for print-on-demand publishers by Linda Rosencrance, Computerworld
• Amazon pulls a Microsoft by Robert L. Mitchell, Computerworld Blogs
• Amazon Puts the Squeeze on Publishers by Betsy Schiffman, Wired Blog Network
• Amazon Gets Demanding with Print-on-Demand Publishers, O’Reilly Radar
• Amazon.com puts the screws to small publishers, Valleywag
• Amazon’s POD monopoly, booktwo.org
• Is Amazon Getting Greedy? , open…
• Oh, REAL nice, Amazon.com, Beatlegirl’s Blog
• Market Report — In Play,MSN Money
• Amazon Muscles Print-On-Demand Services by Duncan Riley, TechCrunch
• Amazon & BookSurge, words count
• Urgent News for Authors, The Holistic Writer
• Monopoly - It’s Not A Game by Jean-Marie Hershey, Print CEO Blog
• Of oil lamps, Print on Demand, and e-book machines: Amazon’s Bezos as a would-be Rockefeller by David Rothman
• Deal Breaker? Amazon - BookSurge - POD - No Choice?, Workboxers
• Amazon.com’s POD land grab, BookFinder.com Journal
• Amazon Changes POD Tactics, Removes Velvet Gloves by Kassia Krozser, Booksquare
• Amazon The Monopoly, PersonaNonData
• Amazon Muscles Print-On-Demand Services, web2bite.com
• Use BookSurge or Die? by Victoria Strauss, Writer Beware
• Amazon/Golliath takes on the little guys by Helen Gallagher, Release Your Writing
• Amazon Bullies POD to Use Booksurge — or Else., Shadowhelm’s Journal
• Amazon Says It Will Only Sell Print-On-Demand Books That It Gets To Print, Techdirt
• Amazon deletes competition, LibraryThing
• What’s Amazon Up To Now? by Tawny Taylor
• Amazon Shaking the POD World Big Time, Juno Books
• A hearty “F$%k you!” to Amazon by Elf M. Sternberg
• A Call to Bloggers: Stop Supporting Amazon, Inhabitatio Dei
• Amazon to Force POD Publishers to Use BookSurge, Media Mensch
• Self Publishers and Amazon, Writerly Stuff
• Amazon Tightens Grip On Printing, booktrade.info
• Amazon to Block Other POD Services from Using Amazon Marketplace, Dear Author
• Amazon trying to screw small presses?, lupabitch
• Dear Amazon, What are You Thinking? by Monica Valentinelli, Words on the Water
• Will Amazon Hurt Small Pagan Publishers?, The Wild Hund
• Amazon and us by Gill Polack
• Will Amazon Become the Google of the POD Industry? by Deborah Woehr
• Down with The Zon! by Celia Kyle
• Beyond the POD grab: The IDPF should fight Amazon’s new eBabel, look for anti-trust violations, and reach out to Google by David Rothman, TeleRead
• Amazon blocking books of competitive publishers?, electronista
• We are not amused–veinglory, PODPeople
• Bully on the block?, The Pearlsong Letter
• The monopolists: You need to worry about Amazon too by Eion Purcell
• Amazon owns the marketplace: return of the distributor, Thudfactor
• Is Amazon trying to monopolize the empowering Publish-On-Demand market?, Chris Boese’s Weblog
• 500 pound gorilla, Idle musings of a bookseller
• Bye-Bye “Buy Buttons” for POD Authors?, The Backroom at Dehanna.com
• Amazon Making a Big Mistake by Cheryl Pickett
• Amazon to force POD publishers to use Booksurge, Murder by 4
• Amazon.com’s dirty little deed, pds_lit
• Amazon’s Stupid Anti-Competitive Move, Principled Profit
• Amazon Bullying POD Writers and Publishers Unfairly, A-ha
• A Call to Bloggers: Stop Supporting Amazon, Resurrection Life
• Amazon.com Is On Drugs, Thought Patterns
• Amazon launches their weapon of mass destruction, steps on the long tail of independent authors by Mark Riffey
• Amazon puts the Squeeze on POD Publishers by Easy Author Web Sites
• An Important Lesson from Amazon on How NOT to Treat Your Customers by Virtual Impax
• Amazon’s Blatant Disrespect of Their Best Customers by Beyond Niche Marketing

Amazon began by providing a superior book buying experience to their customers.  Buying a book from Amazon is BETTER than buying a book in a physical book store because a reader can access other reader reviews and read excerpts online.  Amazon is about to discover that hell hath no fury like a customer scorned.

Deborah Schultz, Chris Heuer, David Parmet

• DP: Brian Oberkirch put this together - he asked 2 questions. How to market into community without being too marketer like. And how do you build a community around what you are doing? What does ‘no marketing’ look like? How can we use social media?
• DS: None of this is about tools or technology, but is about the customers. Here to talk about some of the subtleties, not about the tactics. It’s about marketing, customer service, product development. the marketing silo needs to be changed, why are they afraid of the opps. This is not telling or selling, this is being in the trenches.
• CH: what is really bugging me right now is the number of people who are saying to me ‘build me a community’ but this does make a community, it is the interpersonal connections that make it. Social media is not new media, it changes how we relate to each other. You have to shift the way you think about participation. have to change mindset from stop trying to sell me to help make me buy.

stop trying to sell me to help make me buy

I’d rework that final phrase to…

stop trying to sell me and instead help me solve my problem/fill my want/ meet my need

Fifty years ago selling was push, push, push. Over the past half century the tide has turned and now selling is more of a pull, pull, pull.

Stop Marketing, Stop Selling and Start Connecting

The ENTIRE focus of my first book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results is to help the reader get out of his/her own head and into the head of his/her customers!!! To use the language above…jumping INTO THE TRENCHES and getting down and dirty connecting with your target customers.

When your focus is upon solving your customers problems…. when your focus is upon providing something they want…. when your product or service meets their need… you discover that marketing is merely presenting your solution… your answer to the people who not only want to hear it, but are EAGER to learn more.

Seth Godin writes in “Is Viral Marketing the Same as Word of Mouth“:

Viral marketing [does not equal] word of mouth. Here’s why:

Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.

Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else. (They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.)

So it’s easy to see why a viral marketing campaign would be the holy grail for most marketing professionals or business owners.  Imagine… creating an ad campaign that you don’t have to pay to have delivered…instead it’s carried by your customers to their friends… and their friends carry the message to their friends.  All this is done without any promise of renumeration.

Viral Marketing is indeed the pinnacle of marketing success…the problem is that most attempts at launching “viral marketing campaigns” land FLAT!  For every successful one launched, there are hundreds that fail to engage and deliver.

In 7 tricks to Viral Web Marketing Thomas Baekdal writes for tip #3:

Do not try to make advertisements (that sucks)

One of the biggest mistake companies make is when they think viral marketing is just advertisements that people share - it is not. Traditional marketing is about promoting your product, showing how good it is, giving it center stage - and generally being incredibly selfish (and possibly using supermodels or movie stars). But guess what, nobody cares about you!

Viral marketing is all about a good story. When BMW put out BMW Films, the main ingredient was not the cars, but the story. Replace the car with another one, and it would still be great. When Sony made their Bravia TV ads, the product was not even seen - yet everyone remembers it.

So, in true paradoxical fashion… setting out to create a “viral” marketing campaign is the wrong approach.  Instead, seek to engage and interact with your customer.  CONNECT!!!!

Why in the world would I do such a thing? Because at the time, the 2nd most popular search term after “web development” was “FREE web development”. My practice was busy and growing based upon client referrals and it got to the point where I really didn’t want to deal with the “gimme something for nuttin” crowd.

As a group, these people were a huge drain on my time and energy and they gave little back. The “freebie seekers” I encountered were relentless in their pursuit of obtaining free information and services. They wanted only the best and were an exaggerated case of “champagne taste on a water from the nearest stream” budget.

One thing I’ve noticed in my practice is that every time I raised my rates, the number of “problem” clients dropped dramatically. Fortunately, they were quickly replaced by a “higher quality” client. Betsy Talbot of the Small Business blog noticed a similar phenomenon:

When I stopped having all those free coffee dates my income went up and my interactions were more meaningful.

The Wordpress Pad seems to weigh in on the side of “anti-free”….. in The Value of “Free” on the Web:

The most natural thing as a consumer is to assume that pricey things are worth more than cheap things. This may not always be the case, but we’ve been trained well enough to believe it despite evidence to the contrary in some cases. Regardless, you shouldn’t expect to get a good website for free, just a cheap one.

Free web sites aside, is there value in offering “free” products and services in the name of marketing? Debbie Weil thinks there is. She heralds Tom Peter’s freely distributed promotional materials on his blog as a brilliant marketing move, calling it “cost-free viral marketing”.

I think this is truly a case of where the “brand” or “reputation” of the person or company offering the “freebie”.

In Seth Godin’s post The Thing About Free Godin says:

“When I do a non profit seminar (they’re always free), the number of people who say, “yes I’m coming” and the number of people who come is not the same. So, if I have room for ten, do I do a seminar for eight, or do I book 12 seats and play airline seat manager for the day?”

While Seth Godin’s “show up for free” ratio appears to be roughly 80%, I have clients who are not on “par” with Seth Godin’s or Tom Peter’s stature who consider themselves lucky to get 20% of “free” participants to show up for a seminar.

Bob Warfield writes in his post Does Free Really have Value?

“I’m concerned that free has become undifferentiated and that it now has a lot less value than we think. It is the last refuge when you’ve no idea whether you have a good idea or can sell it, so you loudly proclaim it’s free and wait for the huddled masses to assemble at your doorstep. Except, it’s not enough any more.”

It appears free just isn’t what it used to be in the age of Web 2.0, at least for the “little guy or gal”. The Blog Herald’s “free” marketing experiment yielded similar results. David Peralty writes in The Value of Free Information

“[my free video experiment]… really showed me that the community doesn’t really respect free things. I then added the video option to one of my paid consulting pages, and have had more requests for it since then, than I ever had when it was a free thing I was trying. As soon as I put a monetary value on my time and effort, people started to respect the offering much more.”

It appears there are two types of “free” resources.  Those your visitors perceive as “worth while” and those your visitors perceive as “worth less”.  If you’re a best selling author, giving away freebies is seen as creating a cost free viral marketing campaign.  If you’re anything less.. then your freebie may be perceived as lacking value and a desperate attempt at attention.

What’s your experience with giving away things for free?

That’s a huge theme in my house as I raise three children…. you’d better KNOW how to LEARN. What’s most important is not that you know it now…but rather you’d better be equipped to LEARN what you need to know. As Alex Ragone says in his Learning Blog

“You can’t keep up with all of the information, so don’t try.”

While you can’t keep up with the explosion of easily accessible information available today, I can’t think of a more important skill in business than the ability to learn. Learning is not something that ends with a diploma or a degree.

The Experiential Learning blog says:

The traditional boundaries of education are beginning to break down. … Education is shifting from a period of formality to informality. Even more than ever before we will see students experiencing the material instead of memorizing it, then sharing their knowledge with their peers instead of handing in the exam to be marked.

John Hoff talks about learning in business in his post, The Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Heard - You Never Learn From Your Successes

According to John… the lessons learned from failure are not better than the lessons learned from success. As a matter of fact, John believes the reverse is true.

Vince Lombardi is reported to have said,

“Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.”

If Vince is right, then it definitely makes sense that the BEST lessons learned in business would be the lessons learned from success!

Take out your notebook of pressing problems and begin listing possible solutions on each page. Keep this list loose and broad. You should list EVERYTHING that comes to mind, even if you cannot personally provide a solution right now. It’s important that your solution list is comprehensive, so whatever comes to mind, list it on the page.

Once your list is complete, go back and, if possible, try to assign a $$$ figure to both the problem and solution. Is a messy desk really worth a $2500 solution? It could be, though the reason may not be readily apparent to the uneducated consumer. If you find yourself stumped, try asking yourself what you would pay for the solution. For example, you may not be willing to pay $2500 for an office organization solution, but you might be more than willing to spend $500 for it.

As you review and assign value to your list of problems and solutions, keep track of the compelling reasons your clients need to understand in order to see value in the solutions you have listed.

With that said, the young adults who live with me and depend upon me for support, they are increasingly UNHAPPY with the changes happening at Facebook.  (They express this displeasure by uttering comments such as “Facebook is GAY!”)   Their displeasure lies with the viral applications which at first were so successful in proliferating throughout the site.  As the requests come in from friends, asking them to install new viral applications… my avid Facebook users are just saying “no more”!

However, the rumblings at my house aren’t limited to the viral applications on Facebook, but rather the”spammy” connections made by bumbling marketing wannabes.

Social Networking sites are GREAT for making and maintaining connections… however, participation and communication are the key elements involved in a successful leverage of social networking sites.

It is an unpleasant fact that people have problems. Most buying decisions are a direct effort to alleviate discomfort. Start viewing your best clients as people who have problems that you can solve and you are well on your way to constructing a compelling marketing message.

Define your target market’s most pressing problems.

Grab a notebook and list each pressing problem which your target market is grappling with at the top of each page.

If you’re having problems identifying your target market’s problems, it may be time to develop composite customers to help you get a better idea of why your clients are buying from you. You can learn more about Creating Composite Customers in the book, Beyond the Niche.