There are very few comfort foods on my personal list that come up to the satisfaction level of “Hot Buttered Toast” but, if you think about it, really good Hot Buttered Toast is almost impossible to sell. Really good toast is buttered and eaten moments after it comes out of the toaster and, as simple a recipe as it is, the higher the quality of the bread and butter you use the better the toast is going to taste. Nothing, for example, will ever match my grandmother’s homemade bread straight out of the toaster slathered with real home-churned butter!
So what does “Hot Buttered Toast” have to do with marketing in a recession? We have become a nation of cautious spenders, perhaps rightfully so. For many of us who are small business owners, selling, which is a challenging business anyway, is looming monumental. I know many small business owners who are struggling hard to stay in business right now all the while smiling at networking events and saying “Oh yes, business is fine.”
Sometimes posing zen-koan-like marketing questions can stimulate really creative thinking. I once asked an extremely busy, brand-new, business owner (with a minimal marketing budget) how she could get the message about her new business to 200 new people a month? “Two hundred?” she gasped. At first she was floored but then she rose to the challenge and got extremely creative! Within six months, her database was full of contacts and her business began to take off. I brainstorm with sole proprietors over the “200 people a month” question a lot!
Recently I have also been asking people “What do you sell that is as good as Hot Buttered Toast?” (Or if toast doesn’t do it for you, you might ask: “What do you sell that is as potentially compelling to people as the Thin Mints the Girl Scouts sell?”) Once you locate the aspect of your product or services that has a “comfort food” type appeal, the challenge is to now verbally weave that impression into your marketing message and start getting the word out!
If your business is hurting because of the recession, here’s a small creative exercise to try: identify some aspect of what you sell that is a alluring as “Toast Right Out of the Toaster” and then see how many ways you can get this message out to “200 new people a month.”
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Dhyan Atkinson is a Business Skills Trainer and Business Consultant/Coach. She has just started a gluten-free diet; thus her nostalgia about “toast.” She specializes in teaching small business owners the Five Essential Skills they need to find clients. Check out her programs at http://www.TheFiveEssentialSkills.com, Also see the specific list of offerings for “Marketing Introverts” on this blog site: https://marketing4introverts.wordpress.com/programs-4-mrktg-introverts/
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