Mindshare Marketing

A few days ago I was introduced to the concept of a ‘Life Laundry Day.’ It’s a novel concept where you set aside one day each week (or month) and clean up not just the physical parts of your life, but the mental parts as well.

I usually set Sunday’s aside.  I get up early in the morning, as always, and make myself an extravagant breakfast.  Cheerios are healthier, but there’s something refreshing about a big breakfast once in a while that can’t be passed up.  I spend the morning in church, meditating on the past week and preparing mentally for the coming one.  Lunch is usually spent with friends, catching up on one another’s history or just chatting about what’s new in the world.

I spend the next two hours or so actively cleaning.  Everything on my desk is sorted into three piles:

• Completed work that needs to be filed
• Unimportant work that can be filed
• Recycling

I rarely have anything on my desk Sunday morning that is important enough to stay there Sunday night.  It’s relaxing to start Monday with a clean workspace!

Next comes the actual laundry, vacuuming the house, and tidying up the rest of my living spaces.  It takes me maybe an hour to actually clean everything up at this point, so I take the rest of my time to pay bills and clear my mailbox.

I close up my day with a good movie and/or a great book.  Spending time looking into someone else’s world keeps the creative juices flowing and makes life much easier and more enjoyable in the long run.

I try my hardest to keep my computer off on Sundays.  I have yet to receive a weekend email urgent enough to warrent my immediate attention, and surfing the web just distracts me from taking a rest day and clearing my mind of the mental struggles from the week.

Having a ‘laundry day’ at work can be useful, too.  It’s the one day a month where your entire staff clears out their desks, filing cabinets, and the common workroom.  The result of this?  A happier, more productive office staff with less things on their collective mind and a far simpler workweek than before.

Think of it as wiping everything clean and starting with a brand new whiteboard.  How much more productive would your office be if today’s notes didn’t have to compete for space with notes from three months ago?

I was confronted Saturday with the idea of inflation and the thought that, maybe, it might not be everything my economics professors told me it was.

As a kid, I always wanted to have the best art supplies.  Both my brother and I liked to draw, sketch, and paint.  We would fight during the summer over school supplies because we always wanted to get the best colored pencils, the largest box of crayons, and the most expensive art stock.  It was comical, really.  While now I care about and follow several different brand names, the only company I cared about back then was Crayola and whether or not they’d put the new crayon sharpner on the smaller crayon boxes.

One year, my parents bought my younger brother a $5 set of colored pencils.  Five dollars!  I was beyond impressed, and incredibly jealous.  It wasn’t a fancy set or anything, but the high price tag made us think it was a more elegant collection of tools than the $2 set I had stowed away in my desk at school.

On Saturday I wandered into the school supply section of a store and was flabbergasted by the prices.  A package of 5 spiral-bound notebooks was fifty cents, a box of Crayola colored pencils was a dollar, and a large box of crayons that any six year old in my day would be proud to use was only twenty-two cents!

What happened?  I’ll admit that it’s been a while since I was in the first grade, arguing with my parents over the high price tags on these items, so where’s the inflationary impact on my childhood accessories?  Shouldn’t we be struggling over $10 crayons, $5 each notebooks, and loan-worthy colored pencils by now?  Where’d the inflation I know and hate disappear to?

It disappeared to adult products.  Think back to when you were a child and life was so much simpler.  You’d walk or ride your bike almost everywhere (no gasoline).  Saturday morning cartoons were the highlight of your weekly entertainment (no comedy shows or over-priced Hollywood movies).  You’d get yelled at when your homework went unfinished in favor of Picasso-esque cartoons in some notebook on the table (no Facebook, YouTube, or blogosphere).  Finally, you’d knock on your friend’s door and ask if he or she could come out and play (no Blackberries, email, or meeting requests).

It’s not really that our prices are increasing that much, just our tastes and “needs” as we, and the world, grow older.  I used to ride my bike to our school rival’s football fields … now I almost always drive to the bank (half the distance) and wonder where my money goes.  I used to bottle tap water and make shaved ice for dessert … now there are two gallons of fancy Dreyer’s ice cream in the outside freezer.  I’m definitely spending more money than I did as a child, but is this because of price inflation, or taste inflation?

How about in your life?  Which realm has changed and grown the most?

I had a long conversation with someone the other day about the differences between push and pull marketing.  It was a little disappointing, though, because they had already invested a great deal of time and money developing their pull marketing strategies under the assumption that there was no difference between the two types.  Not all was a waste; pull marketing is still highly effective.  It’s just not as quick to bring in new customers as he would have liked.

Push Marketing

This is any strategy that results in a direct call to action.  Television advertisements with a “call now” message, in-the-field marketing with fliers directing potential customers to “come to the event today,” or even some hosted events that are targeted more towards sales than the event itself are all examples of push marketing.  The idea is to put a hand (the marketing message) behind a prospect and push them to a decision to become a customer.

It can be effective in many areas and for several demographics.  There will always be some products or prospects for which push marketing won’t work, though.

Pull Marketing

This is a longer-term strategy of placing something in the market only loosly related to your product and waiting for customers to pick it up and ask you for more information.  Viral, or buzz, marketing is the best example because prospects are actively seeking out product information and are pulled towards a decision to become a customer.

Demographics and products unaffected by push marketing might be more affected by pull marketing.  The unfortunate tradeoff is the vastly longer sales cycle neccessitated by pull strategies.

Blogging is a pull strategy.  Yes, you can throw some Google AdWords around to drive more traffic to your site, but whether or not people actually read, let alone subscribe, to your blog is dependent on two things:

1. The quality of your content
2. The length of time it’s been available

On the one hand, you can have a stellar blog that’s been online for two weeks.  I doubt you’ll have much traffic, but give it time and that traffic will grow.  On the other hand, you can have a 4-year old blog with random factoids from your life.  If they’re interesting enough, you’ll have traffic.  If not, don’t count on it.

You can increase traffic by sharing links with similar, albeit higher-traffic, blogs or by exchanging comments with their offers.  Like blogging itself, though, this is a pull strategy and will take several months to actually turn out any sort of results.