Tracking Your E-Mail Marketing Campaigns
Labels: Electronic, Hydraulic, marketing, Paragon, Reman, Repair, Servo, video
posted by Kevin @ 12:10 PM
Flexible hours, extra cash drive Valley entrepreneurs
A lot of people watch YouTube videos at work. A few are actually paid to do it.
A former bartender named Joe Bersik sits in front of a flat-screen monitor about eight hours a day, pulling up Internet videos. His job is to find pirated material and get it taken off the Web.
Mr. Bersik works at BayTSP Inc., an eight-year-old start-up with big clients like Viacom Inc., the parent of MTV Networks. BayTSP employs more than 20 video analysts -- sometimes called "hashers" -- who watch videos looking for copyright violations.
Tethered to his computer by headphones, Mr. Bersik on a recent day played the music video of R&B singer Akon's hit song "Don't Matter" on YouTube. The logo of the MTV Jams TV channel was visible at the bottom of the clip. The 53-year-old Mr. Bersik watched for a minute then fired an alert to a colleague who sent an email requesting that YouTube take it down.
In about two hours, the video was gone.
Mr. Bersik and the eight men around him staring at monitors are playing a cat-and-mouse game with the people who post copyrighted clips on the Web. Working from a leafy office park on the fringes of Silicon Valley, they are key players in the legal battle over Internet copyrights between Viacom and Google Inc., which now owns YouTube.
Viacom last fall asked BayTSP to keep a running log of clips from the cartoon show "South Park" and other Viacom programs that people had posted on YouTube. In February, Viacom gave the signal to fire off a barrage of "take-down" notices: In a single batch of emails on Friday, Feb. 2, BayTSP requested that YouTube remove more than 100,000 Viacom clips, in a procedure outlined in U.S. copyright law. The clips Mr. Bersik and others identified were cited in Viacom's $1 billion copyright suit filed against Google the following month. The New York media company says it pays more than $100,000 a month to BayTSP, to find infringing videos and have them removed from YouTube and other sites.
BayTSP says it has more than five TV and movie-studio clients but for contractual reasons can't disclose names other than Viacom. The closely held company says it bills clients as much as $500,000 a month to track down illegal copies of software, music and video clips. Every month it sends out more than a million take-down notices.
Other companies have started using automated technology to identify video clips so they don't have to employ a room full of people manually scanning them as Bay TSP does. YouTube, which says it complies with copyright laws by removing clips when their owners request it, is testing technology to keep infringing videos off its site in the first place. BayTSP thinks human beings will always be needed if only to inspect automated results.
"There will always be something that falls into the gray area," says BayTSP CEO Mark Ishikawa, 42, who is also an active race-car driver. The company and Viacom have faced criticism for mistakenly requesting the takedown of noninfringing clips such as parodies and home videos, though BayTSP says its error rate on Web videos is only around 0.1%.
It's in an open, white-walled room close to Mr. Ishikawa's race-car machine shop at BayTSP's headquarters that Mr. Bersik and the other video analysts sit side-by-side combing through clips looking for clients' content. Movie posters with mustaches drawn on actresses' faces and other defacements hang above the desks.
The analysts use special software to scan the new clips posted to YouTube and other video sites a few times a day, creating lists of potentially infringing ones. They can use a separate program to conduct searches for keywords -- such as "Laguna Beach" or character names -- on the sites and either flag a clip for takedown or clear it to stay up.
On a recent day, their manager, Eric Antze, pulled up a clip from Comedy Central's "Chappelle's Show" that one of his colleagues had identified. "This is clearly copyright infringement," said Mr. Antze, 26, as the video began playing on YouTube. He clicked "Send" in a BayTSP software program running on his other monitor, triggering the email delivery to YouTube of a takedown request. When YouTube receives such emails, employees review them and then remove the clips. Mr. Antze, who was a part-time teacher until he started at BayTSP in November, has a sheet showing the logos of Viacom's various TV channels taped to his monitors.
He says BayTSP has had more than 230,000 clips, which users had viewed more than two billion times, removed from YouTube for Viacom alone. When the Viacom takedowns crossed the 150,000 mark, BayTSP bought better chairs and desks for the analysts.
People who post videos use tricks to make it harder to locate them. Some deliberately misspell the names of shows or films to thwart searching. With music videos, they sometimes include the word "remix" in the title, because the media companies often will let videos altered by users stay. Users often figure out and try to work around the rules BayTSP's clients set for what they want taken down.
The users also remain persistent in finding ways to upload videos again each time they're removed. "By the time I send notices and take them down, they'll be reposted," says Justin Hernandez, 27, who focuses on finding feature films for a BayTSP client.
The part-time DJ says he thought the video-analyst job was "too good to be true" when a friend who works at BayTSP told him he could get paid to watch online videos all day. Analyst salaries start at around $11 an hour. Perks include subsidized 25-cent sodas.
BayTSP's analysts say they don't tell friends and family exactly what they do, because they sign agreements not to disclose specifics of their work or the media-company clients. Scott Martine, 26, says his vagueness has led friends to suspect he is in the pornography business.
Mr. Bersik tells people he works for an Internet security company. The amateur guitar player, who has worked here since January, spends much of his time taking down music videos recorded off Viacom's MTV and other music channels. He keeps a dogeared copy of the Billboard music charts printed each Tuesday in USA Today on his desk to give him ideas for songs and artists he should search for.
Some analysts complain of tired eyes, and the tedium of watching the same clips over and over. "The novelty of 'Oh great, I get to look at YouTube videos all day' -- that wears off real quick," says Mr. Martine, who has worked at BayTSP since January. "Are you prepared to watch a million videos over and over again?" Mr. Antze asks job applicants.
The men, mostly in their 20s, play basketball in the parking lot during a 3 p.m. break each day. They combat the monotony by passing links to quirky clips around the office. One recent oddball favorite was a video of a flamboyant German disco-era group performing in Genghis Khan-inspired outfits.
The analysts generally say they have little appetite for YouTube outside of work anymore, however. "By the time I'm done working on it for eight hours, this is the last site I want to go to," says Mr. Antze.
[Via - Startup Journal]
Labels: money, online, online business, online business idea, online marketing, video, youtube
posted by Kevin @ 4:55 PM
Home-business rules get tougher
A lot of people watch YouTube videos at work. A few are actually paid to do it.
A former bartender named Joe Bersik sits in front of a flat-screen monitor about eight hours a day, pulling up Internet videos. His job is to find pirated material and get it taken off the Web.
Mr. Bersik works at BayTSP Inc., an eight-year-old start-up with big clients like Viacom Inc., the parent of MTV Networks. BayTSP employs more than 20 video analysts -- sometimes called "hashers" -- who watch videos looking for copyright violations.
Tethered to his computer by headphones, Mr. Bersik on a recent day played the music video of R&B singer Akon's hit song "Don't Matter" on YouTube. The logo of the MTV Jams TV channel was visible at the bottom of the clip. The 53-year-old Mr. Bersik watched for a minute then fired an alert to a colleague who sent an email requesting that YouTube take it down.
In about two hours, the video was gone.
Mr. Bersik and the eight men around him staring at monitors are playing a cat-and-mouse game with the people who post copyrighted clips on the Web. Working from a leafy office park on the fringes of Silicon Valley, they are key players in the legal battle over Internet copyrights between Viacom and Google Inc., which now owns YouTube.
Viacom last fall asked BayTSP to keep a running log of clips from the cartoon show "South Park" and other Viacom programs that people had posted on YouTube. In February, Viacom gave the signal to fire off a barrage of "take-down" notices: In a single batch of emails on Friday, Feb. 2, BayTSP requested that YouTube remove more than 100,000 Viacom clips, in a procedure outlined in U.S. copyright law. The clips Mr. Bersik and others identified were cited in Viacom's $1 billion copyright suit filed against Google the following month. The New York media company says it pays more than $100,000 a month to BayTSP, to find infringing videos and have them removed from YouTube and other sites.
BayTSP says it has more than five TV and movie-studio clients but for contractual reasons can't disclose names other than Viacom. The closely held company says it bills clients as much as $500,000 a month to track down illegal copies of software, music and video clips. Every month it sends out more than a million take-down notices.
Other companies have started using automated technology to identify video clips so they don't have to employ a room full of people manually scanning them as Bay TSP does. YouTube, which says it complies with copyright laws by removing clips when their owners request it, is testing technology to keep infringing videos off its site in the first place. BayTSP thinks human beings will always be needed if only to inspect automated results.
"There will always be something that falls into the gray area," says BayTSP CEO Mark Ishikawa, 42, who is also an active race-car driver. The company and Viacom have faced criticism for mistakenly requesting the takedown of noninfringing clips such as parodies and home videos, though BayTSP says its error rate on Web videos is only around 0.1%.
It's in an open, white-walled room close to Mr. Ishikawa's race-car machine shop at BayTSP's headquarters that Mr. Bersik and the other video analysts sit side-by-side combing through clips looking for clients' content. Movie posters with mustaches drawn on actresses' faces and other defacements hang above the desks.
The analysts use special software to scan the new clips posted to YouTube and other video sites a few times a day, creating lists of potentially infringing ones. They can use a separate program to conduct searches for keywords -- such as "Laguna Beach" or character names -- on the sites and either flag a clip for takedown or clear it to stay up.
On a recent day, their manager, Eric Antze, pulled up a clip from Comedy Central's "Chappelle's Show" that one of his colleagues had identified. "This is clearly copyright infringement," said Mr. Antze, 26, as the video began playing on YouTube. He clicked "Send" in a BayTSP software program running on his other monitor, triggering the email delivery to YouTube of a takedown request. When YouTube receives such emails, employees review them and then remove the clips. Mr. Antze, who was a part-time teacher until he started at BayTSP in November, has a sheet showing the logos of Viacom's various TV channels taped to his monitors.
He says BayTSP has had more than 230,000 clips, which users had viewed more than two billion times, removed from YouTube for Viacom alone. When the Viacom takedowns crossed the 150,000 mark, BayTSP bought better chairs and desks for the analysts.
People who post videos use tricks to make it harder to locate them. Some deliberately misspell the names of shows or films to thwart searching. With music videos, they sometimes include the word "remix" in the title, because the media companies often will let videos altered by users stay. Users often figure out and try to work around the rules BayTSP's clients set for what they want taken down.
The users also remain persistent in finding ways to upload videos again each time they're removed. "By the time I send notices and take them down, they'll be reposted," says Justin Hernandez, 27, who focuses on finding feature films for a BayTSP client.
The part-time DJ says he thought the video-analyst job was "too good to be true" when a friend who works at BayTSP told him he could get paid to watch online videos all day. Analyst salaries start at around $11 an hour. Perks include subsidized 25-cent sodas.
BayTSP's analysts say they don't tell friends and family exactly what they do, because they sign agreements not to disclose specifics of their work or the media-company clients. Scott Martine, 26, says his vagueness has led friends to suspect he is in the pornography business.
Mr. Bersik tells people he works for an Internet security company. The amateur guitar player, who has worked here since January, spends much of his time taking down music videos recorded off Viacom's MTV and other music channels. He keeps a dogeared copy of the Billboard music charts printed each Tuesday in USA Today on his desk to give him ideas for songs and artists he should search for.
Some analysts complain of tired eyes, and the tedium of watching the same clips over and over. "The novelty of 'Oh great, I get to look at YouTube videos all day' -- that wears off real quick," says Mr. Martine, who has worked at BayTSP since January. "Are you prepared to watch a million videos over and over again?" Mr. Antze asks job applicants.
The men, mostly in their 20s, play basketball in the parking lot during a 3 p.m. break each day. They combat the monotony by passing links to quirky clips around the office. One recent oddball favorite was a video of a flamboyant German disco-era group performing in Genghis Khan-inspired outfits.
The analysts generally say they have little appetite for YouTube outside of work anymore, however. "By the time I'm done working on it for eight hours, this is the last site I want to go to," says Mr. Antze.
[Via - Startup Journal]
Labels: money, online, online business, online business idea, online marketing, video, youtube
posted by Kevin @ 12:01 PM
Creating Sales Tools That Build Your Brand
posted by Kevin @ 11:48 PM
The Biggest Secret To Successful Copywriting There Is
Many small-business owners believe they can save time by telling their employees both what to do and how to do it. After all, in most cases they initially had to do all of the jobs now held by their employees, so it makes sense to save them the effort of trying to figure things out for themselves…right?
Wrong. Delegation is a better approach, because it launches employees into effective, independent action and saves time and resources in the long run. Each situation and assignment is unique, but there are three simple yet powerful steps that you can take to delegate more effectively:
1. Understand whether you are making a request or issuing a command. A request allows the person to say, 'No, thank you,' whereas a command is not optional.
2. Be sure to make your request or command clear by including the following points:
The task you want done.
The reason it needs to be done.
When it needs to be done.
What resources (people, dollars, technology) you are making available for its completion.
What you expect the final product to look like.
How you will make yourself available to answer any questions.
An agreement on a midpoint check-in.
Faulty assumptions in any of these areas can result in problems and delays.
3. Don't skip your midpoint check-in. If, at that point, you find the person or team way off base, you may be tempted to micro manage the remainder of the project or task. Don't. Instead, reassess whether you made a crystal clear request and whether your people are capable and motivated. If you need to clarify your task then do so. If your people are not capable and motivated, then reassign the task.
Delegating effectively helps you make the most of your resources, allows for greater overall productivity, and launches your employees into effective, independent action.
David Peck
Founder
Leadership Unleashed
San Francisco, Calif.
Labels: chick, Extreme, Final, real estate, video
posted by Kevin @ 10:10 AM
The trend, building since the late 1990s, hit a milestone this year when the number of these microbusinesses reached 20 million — one for every six private-sector workers, a new analysis of government data shows.
In place of paid employees, owners harness new technologies to outsource work, often linking up with other like-minded entrepreneurs to get jobs done in a virtual assembly line spanning the globe.
Last year, Lisa and Mark Solomon started The Billable Hour, a specialty wristwatch and greeting card maker and retailer, from their home near New York City. They rely on a far-flung network to produce their goods: A graphic artist in Utah, a watch designer outside New York City, a San Diego cartoonist, a website technician in Buffalo.
Like many microbusinesses, Billable Hour is a part-time venture for Lisa, 38, and Mark, 48, attorneys with two young children. Depending on holiday sales, they hope to turn their first profit this year. "We're both professionals, but it's nice to have another income stream," Lisa says.
For legions of other owners, tiny businesses are a full-time source of growing revenue. Near Nashville, Mary Ferrin expects to sell $150,000 in party games this year, a 50% jump from 2005. She outsources work to other entrepreneurs in Greece and Canada.
Microbusinesses' receipts rose to $887 billion in 2004, the most recent available; 7% annual growth puts it on track for $1 trillion in sales this year.
The rise of microbusinesses comes as corporate giants shed workers and fight for revenue. "The big guy is going away," says marketer Seth Godin, author of this year's Small is the New Big.
Wal-Mart, the biggest private employer, with 1.3 million workers, is now struggling to jump-start sales; November revenue fell for the first time in a decade. Ford Motor, steamrolled by foreign competitors, is aiming for 60,000 hourly workers by 2008 vs. 100,000 at the end of 2005. Hewlett-Packard slashed 15,000 jobs — about 10% of its workforce — to bolster its stock.
Meanwhile, microbusinesses are surging. There were 19.5 million in 2004, up 27% from 1997, when the federal government began publishing annual data on non-employer firms. The number of firms with employees rose a far smaller 7.3% during the same period, to 5.9 million.
Non-employer firms are often home-based ventures with no paid employees and generally at least $1,000 in annual revenue. In an analysis for USA TODAY, the Small Business Administration estimates the number of these firms reached the 20 million mark for the first time this year.
Technology edge
New and cheaper technologies are flattening the business landscape, spurring entrepreneurs to launch companies in their spare time without employees. Most are in service industries such as retailing, accounting and public relations. The technologies include websites powered by free software, Internet phone services and powerful $1,000 laptops.
The Solomons spent just $5,100 on Billable Hour's website. The name reflects the novelty of their product: watches showing time in six-minute increments, which is how many attorneys bill hourly rates.
Lisa was already familiar with entrepreneurship. She's been a self-employed attorney for 10 years, doing research for law firms. Mark, an attorney for insurance giant Chubb, dreamed up the watch idea. The Solomons added to their business line clocks and humorous greetings cards, also aimed at attorneys.
Lisa, more adept at technology, turned to the Internet to find designers, manufacturers and others to get the goods. Among them: Stu Rees, 37, in San Diego. He's a self-employed attorney and cartoonist, creating illustrations for Billable Hour's cards.
Like the Solomons, Rees doesn't employ anyone. Instead, he's turned to other self-employed artists as far away as Argentina and India for cartoons when he has more work than he can handle. "I would rather have a slightly smaller business and not have the headaches of personnel," he says.
The Solomons are seizing a niche that wouldn't be profitable for traditional small businesses or, especially, big corporations, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. "You need these smaller companies to fill in the holes," Zandi says.
Billable Hour is small enough that Lisa can run it alone. But even if it grew, she'd resist hiring. She cites a litany of reasons, including workers' compensation insurance, health benefits, federal and state payroll taxes, and complying with workplace regulations.
Those are many of the same gripes mentioned by other micro-entrepreneurs, says Gene Fairbrother, a consultant to the National Association for the Self-Employed. The group has about 250,000 members.
Employers of all sizes have a certain amount of overhead for legal advice, bookkeeping and other expenses to comply with federal employment regulations. The smallest employers pay more per worker than big companies, says economics professor Mark Crain of Lafayette College in Easton, Pa.
Those with fewer than 20 workers spend an average of $2,224 a year per worker vs. $1,621 for companies with 500 or more workers, Crain found in a study.
The Hollywood model
Eliminating those costs, the new microbusinesses follow Hollywood's model. Film producers assemble teams of actors, writers, set designers, electricians and other craftspeople to create movies.
"They come together, do the work and then disperse," says Terri Lonier of Working Solo, which advises self-employed professionals and big companies working with them.
Microbusiness owners work together using new collaborative software to share and update text documents, spreadsheets, videos and other files on remote computers. Some of the software, such as Google's growing documents-management suite, is free.
In Houston two years ago, John Whiteside started Squarevox, a one-man business consultant in marketing, communications and strategy. Although he works from home without employees, Whiteside doesn't work alone. He joins four other self-employed workers in the same industry, bidding jointly for new business and to complete projects. The others are in Syracuse, N.Y., Alexandria, Va., and the Boston area.
Whiteside, 41, says his start-up costs for a computer, laser printer and fax machine were no more than $4,000. He expects to earn as much this year as he was paid when he worked for his last employer.
Rock-bottom communication costs for phone calls, swapping e-mail and documents also make their virtual team viable, Whiteside says. That's a switch from the pre-Internet days of a decade ago. "Everything was phone, fax, face-to-face meetings," he says.
Whiteside and two of his quasi-partners hold conference calls every Monday morning to keep up with business such as a recent project to create a marketing campaign for business groups in the Syracuse area.
Go where the talent is
As microbusinesses gain customers, their owners' resolve to avoid workers gets tested. Sometimes, they can only outsource so much. Near Nashville, games-maker Ferrin recently hired a temporary worker to handle the crush of holiday orders at her Dinner and a Murder business. It sells eight party games she created and began selling in 2001 from her home.
Ferrin, 44, also pays her mother to do about six hours' bookkeeping some weeks, "just enough to keep me from going nuts."
Other than that, she outsources all work developing games in which party guests assume the roles of mobsters and other characters to solve a murder.
A freelance writer, Andy Boxall, outside Athens, develops characters. Boxall, 33, works from home without employees. "I use the Internet extensively for finding new markets," he says in an e-mail.
Ferrin says an artist "somewhere in Indiana" who she's never met creates game artwork. A freelance technician near Toronto helps fine-tune her website.
She found them by posting requests on online forums and surfing the Internet, expanding her pool of potential talent far beyond Tennessee. "Got to go where you can find the talent," Ferrin says.
Labels: Powell, rape, requirements, sell, video
posted by Kevin @ 12:30 PM
One of the most frequently asked questions that I hear, especially coming from my more entrepreneurial clients, is, “Why would anyone ever buy this franchise?”
This question is usually followed by a series of observations. “Anyone could do it.” “There’s nothing to this business.” “I don’t think this business can be franchised.” And of course, the final underlying question, “Why wouldn’t someone simply do this themselves?”
Their concern is a valid one. Some concepts are simply not well differentiated. Moreover, some of them have low barriers to entry.
So can a business that is not unique still franchise successfully? And if so, how?
The Mindset of the Entrepreneur
Whenever I hear these questions, my first response is to point to some of the undifferentiated concepts that have achieved high levels of success in the marketplace. “What about janitorial services—why have they been so successful?” Then I go through the list. Maid services. Lawn care. Carpet cleaning. Temporary and permanent placement firms. And of course, the list goes on and on.
The fact of the matter is, a significant number of franchise companies are in industries in which their products or services are not readily differentiated.
What these questioning entrepreneurs fail to understand is that, as entrepreneurs, they are the one group on earth that is perhaps the least suited to understand the mindset of the prospective franchisee.
The typical entrepreneur is, at least by my definition, someone who never saw a rule he or she did not want to break. And, in many respects, the entrepreneur is often the last person you would want to be a franchisee. The best franchisees are not the rule-breakers. And, in fact, the truly entrepreneurial are often the least inclined to buy a franchise.
The best franchisees are motivated adopters—people willing to accept some level of risk, but people who, nonetheless, are willing to follow the rules established by their franchisor.
But if the franchisee isn’t buying your “secret recipe,” what exactly are they buying?
Ultimately, what the franchise prospect is buying is a combination of two things: a strong value proposition plus a unique market position.
Developing the Value Proposition
If you are thinking about franchising a business that you feel isn’t particularly sexy or unique, chances are, you have already watched a number of your competitors come and go. Why did they fail, while you survived with a similar product or service? The answer is the system.
The system is the embodiment of all those things that make the ultimate difference between success or failure. Site selection. Lease negotiation. Advertising. Customer service. Branding. Positioning. Purchasing. Pricing. Merchandising. Hiring. Training. Managing. Quality control. Financial management. It can be found in everything from the products you buy to the way your people answer the phones.
When someone buys a McDonald’s franchise, they aren’t doing it because they want the recipe for the “special sauce” on the Big Mac. In fact, they probably aren’t doing it because they believe that McDonald’s serves the world’s finest hamburgers. But few would argue over the quality of their systems—which are among the best in the world.
The best companies not only have developed their systems, but they use those systems to ensure consistency at the consumer level.
And that is what your franchisees want to buy—a consistent consumer experience that has been proven in the marketplace.
And your job, as the franchisor of an undifferentiated concept, is to show the franchisee how to replicate your success. Through some combination of services and support, you need to teach your franchisee how to achieve what you have achieved. That will likely mean the development of training programs, operations manuals, site selection criteria, advertising guidelines and other elements of “the system” that will allow your franchisees to take advantage of the intellectual property you have developed over the years. Moreover, you will want to provide your franchisees with the benefits of your labor and your relationships—the brand, your purchasing power, etc.—that you have developed over the years. Combined, these elements constitute the value proposition that your franchisee will pay you for.
But the value proposition alone is not enough.
Positioning your Concept
Even the most mundane concept can work as a franchise if it can be replicated. But if your system does not have that special “sizzle,” you may have to work hard to sell it.
For those few concepts that are fortunate enough to be “first movers,” their first position in the market can be enough—assuming, of course, that they grow fast enough to maintain brand dominance. But for the rest of the franchisors out there, a value proposition alone will not be enough. The concept will need to be differentiated from others in the marketplace if it hopes to achieve any significant level of success.
Let’s take another look at McDonald’s. On its surface, especially in the early years, it was a simple concept—basically, hamburgers and fries with drinks. And for years after they started franchising, dozens of franchised competitors came and went. All, that is, except for a select few.
Burger King realized McDonald’s had staked out the “fast burger” segment in the market and knew if it were to compete with McDonald’s, it had to differentiate itself in the eyes of the consumer. So it adopted a position that McDonald’s could not attack: “Have it your way, at Burger King.”
The genius of this position was that Burger King had staked out a position to which McDonald’s could not competitively respond. Burger King’s operating system differentiated it from McDonald’s, and McDonald’s was not in a position to revamp its operating system to respond to this new threat. And Burger King prospered.
Over the years, more competitors came and went.
More than a decade later, Wendy’s was able to crack the “Big Two” using a different form of differentiation: marketing. At that time, both McDonald’s and Burger King were heavily promoting themselves to children. Wendy’s succeeded where others had failed by offering “old-fashioned” made-to-order hamburgers and promoting itself to an older audience, using an octogenarian spokesperson asking “Where’s the Beef?” and an offer that included “plenty of napkins”—which is not what the person feeding children may want to hear.
In order to succeed in franchising—especially if you are in a commodity-type market—you simply have to differentiate your concept from those of your established franchised competitors.
That differentiation can come at the operational level (as in the cases of Burger King), in the form of marketing (Wendy’s) or in a number of other forms. Some concepts differentiate themselves in the eyes of their franchisees by offering a lower investment franchise package (a double-drive thru hamburger operation is less expensive to build and operate than is a Burger King).
Others differentiate based on services: both high and low. Some franchisors tout their high levels of service. Some janitorial service franchisors, for example, will actually procure their franchisee’s customers—so all the franchisee has to do is to service the account.
Interestingly, others have taken just the opposite approach. Some carpet cleaning and postal service franchises got their start by promoting themselves as “the un-franchise,” touting minimal fees and minimal intrusion into the franchisee’s day-to-day operations.
Contractually, franchisors can differentiate themselves through a more liberal contract, through reduced fees or royalties (not a particularly good strategy, in most instances), through a bigger territory, or through different support services.
Be Best at Something
In fact, there are numerous ways for franchisors to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, even if they have a relatively undifferentiated consumer offering. But if you want to capture a long-term market position, you need to be perceived as being the best at something.
Retail consultant McMillan|Doolittle, in their groundbreaking work on the EST model for retail success, propose that a retailer needs to be the best at something in order to survive in today’s competitive marketplace.
The model, in grossly oversimplified terms, states that a retailer has to be best in one of five essential areas in order to “win” in the retail game:
Moreover, the theory states that while retailers can choose to be two of these at once (biggest and cheapest, a la Wal-Mart), they will make a big mistake if they try to be more than two. They hold that the strategy of trying to be everything to everybody leads to a lack of position and a downward spiral in the market.
In franchising, especially when it comes to commodity-oriented concepts, many of these same principles apply. Over and above the need for a strong value proposition, the best franchisors will actively seek to command their desired position in the marketplace. You may find other things to differentiate your concept—or perhaps new ESTs where you can command the high ground.
One thing is for sure: If you don’t know how you want to be positioned in the marketplace, your prospects may end up being educated on your position by your competitors. And that is generally not a good strategy for sales success. For even more information on positioning, read "The Importance of Brand 'Sizzle.'"
Mark Siebert is the "Franchising Your Business" coach at Entrepreneur.comand the founder and CEO of iFranchise Group Inc.,a consulting company that helps businesses assess their franchising potential and develop and improve existing franchise systems.
posted by Kevin @ 4:55 AM
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Women prefer the remote over the mouse when it comes to watching videos even though they outnumber men in cyberspace.
About 97 million women in the United States will use the Internet this year compared with 91 million men, according to a study by eMarketer.
But the report also says only 66 percent of those women are watching videos online compared to 78 percent of men.
"Men are more visual than women, who tend to communicate in writing and or in words," said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst with eMarketer and the author of the report.
She said at first she was shocked at the disparity between the sexes because women tend to watch more television. But she argues men are generally ahead of the technology trend.
"Women are more likely to use the Internet to get things done, to accomplish tasks, to check something off of a checklist that they need to do," Williamson said.
"Men are more likely to use the Internet to have fun. And a lot of what you see on youtube.com is silly, time-saving kinds of things that maybe women don't feel they have the time for, or don't want to have the time for."
Williamson said that despite the growth of youtube.com, women have not been part of the site's traffic spike.
"You really do see youtube.com continuing to be more of a male-dominated video site," Williamson said.The study suggests women will not lag behind for long. By 2011, 84.6 percent of women will be Internet video viewers, right behind men at 88.8 percent.
"The gap is going to close pretty quickly as the content becomes available that women are interested in and they become more comfortable with it," Williamson said.
Today's generation of teenage girls will also make a difference because they are used to viewing video online as much as their male counterparts, she said.
Williamson said that women may eventually prefer online video because it is more flexible for their busy schedules at work and home.
"We see a really huge opportunity for TV networks to really enhance their online video offerings and provide more video that's aimed at women."
Labels: advertisement, marketing, tv, video, woman
posted by Kevin @ 8:22 PM
Get FREE stuff by an one click.
Labels: marketing, online, online marketing, video
posted by Kevin @ 8:19 PM
