MYM Marketing-Expert Newsletters

If you’re like most people, your stock portfolio has taken a beating the last few months, and you might even be one of the unfortunate who are out of a job as you read this. You could be one of the unlucky millions who owns a home that’s worth less than you owe on it, or worse, one of the unfortunate many who have lost their homes to foreclosure. Make no mistake—times are tough out there. And things might not get much easier any time soon. But let’s take a few minutes and get a clear historical perspective on now versus the “good-old-days”.

Despite my personal losses this past few months, I am extremely grateful to be living NOW, and belive we’re destined for growth and for greatness, largely BECAUSE of this experience.

I’ve culled some statistics for you to consider from an excellent book by Greg Easterbrook called The Progress Paradox. The book documents the fact that in almost every important category of standard of living we have it better than any society in the history of the planet—including the “good-old-days” society we wistfully dream about from when we were kids and “things were better.” No, they were not better. You were just a kid and didn’t know any better.

Here, for your consideration, are 60 things to be thankful for:

• In 1890, less than 1 percent of American households earned the equivalent of $75,000 in today’s dollars; now nearly a quarter of households are at that favored point.
  
• The typical person now commands twice the real buying power of his father and/or mother in the year 1960.
  
• Cars, furniture, clothing, and other common goods have shown a steady, ongoing decline in the number of work-hours required for the typical American to purchase them.
  
• Today a third of America’s families own three cars or more.
  
• Today the typical American home has 5.3 rooms for its average of 2.6 people. This means that a longstanding metric of comfortable living, “a room of one’s own,” has gone one better; on average, Americans of today have two rooms of their own.
  
• The average child or teenager has his or her own bedroom—for the first time in history this has been achieved for an entire large society, not just the elite.
  
• In the 2000 Census, American dwellings without indoor plumbing dropped below 1 percent for the first time in history.
  
• The average size of a new home now built in the United States is 2,349 square feet, including three bedrooms and two and a half baths… compared to 1,100 square feet in 1950 with only one bathroom for the entire household.
  
• Ninety-five percent of American homes are now centrally heated, versus about 15 percent in our grandparents’ generation; 78 percent have air conditioning, versus essentially zero back then.
  
• Even with the recently high foreclosure rate, almost 70 percent of Americans still own their own home, versus less than 20 percent a century ago, when most Americans were tenants.
  
• Four-fifths of American adults are now high school graduates, compared to one-third in 1947.
  
• One-quarter of Americans hold college degrees, compared to about 6% in 1947; today Americans average 15.2 years of education.
  
• Today, two-thirds of high school graduates go on to at least some college, while fewer than 10 percent drop out of high school.
  
• The United States is on the short path to becoming the first society in history with more adults who are college graduates than are not.
  
• 84 percent of Americans have medical insurance and most of those who don’t have it receive medical attention in an emergency room situation. Medical insurance was practically non-existent after World War I, and only the elite wealthy were protected against ruinous medical expenses.
  
• Americans collectively take twenty-five million overseas vacations per year.
  
• Americans took 612 million airline trips in 2002. Approximately 200 million Americans, 70 percent of the nation, are members of the “jet set.” Just 105 years ago airplanes did not exist.
  
• The typical American eats four restaurant meals per week and spends 49 percent of their food dollars in restaurants compared to just 25% in 1955.
  
• 58 percent of American men work in white-collar occupations which require no physical toil, along with 52 percent of women. This means there are now more white-collar Americans than blue-collar.
  
• In 1850, the typical American man’s workweek was sixty-six hours; in 1900, fifty-three hours; today it is forty-two hours.
  
• A century ago, 90 percent of women spent at least four hours per day doing primary housework: cooking, cleaning; But only 14 percent in the year 2000 spent four or more hours per day at this task.
  
• Compared to 1880, the typical adult male has forty MORE hours per week available for relaxation; the typical American woman now has about thirty MORE relaxation hours per week.
  
• You can spend your leisure time watching movies that cost $100 million to make for $8 at the cinema, for $15 on your DVD player or computer, or for free on one of your four televisions.
  
• In the mid 1800’s, the typical person spent 50 percent of his or her waking hours engaged in some form of imposed labor (ie, working). Today it is a little under 20 percent of a person’s lifetime.
  
• During the 1990s, homicides fell by 75 percent in San Diego, 70 percent I New York City, by big margins in Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, and other cities.
  
• Domestic violence against women fell 21 percent in the 1990s. Robbery and burglary declined; car theft declined. Rape declined by 40 percent . Gun use declined.
  
• By 2001, the figures for the Forty-first Precinct in the Bronx had fallen to 12 homicides from 130 homicides per year in the 70s, to 225 burglaries from 6,433, and to 239 robberies from 2,632—in total, roughly a 95 percent decline.
  
• Twenty-five years ago, only one-third of America’s lakes and rivers were safe for fishing and swimming; today two-thirds are. {Leading Index of Environmental Indicators, EPA}
  
• Since 1970 smog has declined by a third, even as the number of cars has nearly doubled; acid rain has declined by 67 percent, even though the United States now burns twice as much coal; even airborne lead, a poison, is down 97 percent.
  
• During the 1980s, Los Angeles averaged about 150 ozone “health advisory” days per year, and about fifty “stage one” ozone alerts. By 2000, the number of advisory days had fallen to about twenty per year, and in 2003, Los Angeles has had no stage-one ozone alert for four years running. {www.aqmd.gov}
  
• Toxic emissions by industry declined 51 percent from 1988 to 2002.
  
• Total American water consumption has declined 9 percent in the past fifteen years, even as the population has expanded in the arid Southwest. The wooded acreage of the United States has been expanding for more than a decade.
  
• Deer populations have expanded, and once-periled species such as the bald eagle, gray whale, brown pelican, and peregrine falcon have recovered in numbers and been “delisted” from emergency protection.
  
• Prices of most primary commodities, specially metals, coals, and ores, have been falling for two decades.
  
• Credible estimates put the world’s proven reserve of petroleum at about one trillion barrels, a forty-year supply at current and projected consumption rates, while . . . an additional trillion barrels . . . will become recoverable with improved technology.
  
• At the beginning of the twentieth century, the average American life expectancy was forty-one years, but by the twenty-first century it had risen to seventy-seven years.
  
• The average life expectancy for the entire world is sixty-six years as opposed to forty-seven in 1900.
  
• Heart disease and stroke have been declining for decades. By the year 2000, U.S. incidence of heart disease death was 60 percent lower, adjusted for population increase, than in 1950; incidence of stroke deaths fell 70 percent in the same period.
  
• Most cancers, including breast cancer are in retreat for the first time since increasing average age made cancer a general concern. Most studies by the National Cancer Institute show cancer mortality declining at about 1 percent per year since 1993, again despite overall aging.
  
• Infant mortality has declined 45 percent since 1980, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and is now down to 0.7 percent of live births, the lowest figure ever for the United States.
  
• The rate of suicide in the U.S. rate has fallen 18% since 1950.
  
• Most forms of accidental deaths are in long-term decline, as are workplace fatalities. Deaths by fire, especially, have declined, down by 50 percent
  
• Traffic deaths have been hitting new lows on an almost annual basis. For example, 42,850 Americans died in automobile crashes in 2002 versus 52,627 in 1970, though the population rose and auto miles traveled increased about 75 percent through that period. {www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/Rpts/2003/Assess01.pdf}
  
• Use of most illegal drugs has been declining for two decades. Alcohol consumption per capita has been declining for a generation, including among the young. Cigarette use continues to decline. Today just 10 percent of Americans tenth-graders smoke, believed to be the lowest number for this age group since packaged cigarettes became common in the 1920s. {America’s Children: Indicators of Well-Being 2002}
  
• The divorce rate, which had been climbing seemingly inexorably since the 1950s, flattened out in the 1990s and at present is in shallow decline. It is no longer true that, when you attend a wedding, there is a fifty-fifty chance you are watching people swear vows that will not last.
  
• The rate of children born out of marriage, climbing seemingly inexorably since the 1950s, like the divorce rate flattened in 1990s and at present is in shallow decline.
  
• During the 1990s, the segment of children who lived with both parents rose from 51 percent to 56 percent.
  
• Teen pregnancy and births to teens fell, by 22 percent and by 15 percent, respectively, during the 1990s.
  
• Most public-school test scores are either slightly up (math proficiency) or flat (reading proficiency). {Thomas Loveless of the Brooking Institution}
  
• Since the beginning of the twentieth century, overall IQ scores have risen about 20 percent.
  
• Women and minority-group members continue to assume roles once restricted to white males.
  
• The gap between women’s and men’s wages has been shrinking for a generation, and today is the smallest ever. In 1982, women as a group earned 62.5 percent as much as men, and by 2002 that share had risen to 77.5 percent.
  
• Through the last generation, the portion of African-Americans living in middle-class circumstances has more than doubled. By the end of the twentieth century, black poverty had dropped to the lowest rate ever recorded. {2002 study National Urban League}
  
• The percentage of U.S. children living in poverty declined from a peak of 22 percent in 1993, just before reforms were enacted, to 16 percent, the lowest figure of a generation.
  
• In the United States there continue to be jobs, including plenty of desirable jobs, and an almost unlimited supply of goods and services at reasonable prices.
  
• Food, housing, clothing, and other essentials cost less in real-dollar terms than a generation ago, despite being higher in quality, while prices of some categories of consumer goods, notably electronics, fall steadily.
  
• The Cold War never became a hot war, and ended with democracy routing tyranny. Nuclear-bomb factories in the United States and the former Soviet Union once turned out doomsday weapons in hideous numbers; today they run in reverse, disassembling warheads in the largest and most important arms-reduction in history. In 2002, the U.S. and the Russian Federation agreed to reduce the number of strategic nuclear warheads . . . to no more than 2,200 per nation. Once accomplished, 90 percent of the Armageddon arsenal will be gone.
  
• Twenty-five years ago, only about a third of the globe’s nations held true free elections; today, two-thirds do.
  
• That democratic governments now outnumber autocratic governments two to one is a situation unprecedented in world history.
  
• The number of armed conflicts in the world has declined. There were twenty-eight declared wars and forty-five armed conflicts globally in 2002, versus forty-eight declared wars and sixty-five armed conflicts in 1993.
  
• In 2000, four times the number of people in the world died in traffic accidents than those who died in any form of combat—1.3 million traffic deaths versus 300,000 deaths from war. The fact that car crashes currently pose a greater threat to the citizens of the earth than combat is surely progress in the right direction. {World Health Organization 2000}

So, next time you start to complain that you can barely fit two bags of golf clubs in the impossibly small trunk of your Lexus, pause and remember how blessed you really are. No matter how bad you think you might have it.

Tags: Marketing Tips // Add Comment »

Have you ever heard the saying, “If you want to know why John Smith buys what John Smith buys, you’ve got to see the world through John Smith’s eyes?” Well, first of all it’s true… If you want to know why John Smith buys what John Smith buys, you DO HAVE TO see the world through John Smith’s eyes. But here’s the thing: most companies know how to do it; they know how to look through John Smith’s eyes… but unfortunately, they don’t know how to communicate it through to their customers.

The problem is that while most businesses are very good at knowing what John Smith wants, because they aren’t communications experts, they don’t have the ability to communicate via advertising and marketing their “inside reality” to the outside world. They can’t take their good (or great!) inside reality and lead prospects to the conclusion… “I would have to be an absolute fool to do business with anyone else but you.” How to do that is what Monopolize Your Marketplace is all about.

Think about your business. Your ability to know what John Smith wants is what has made you as successful as you are now. I’ll assume that you have a good inside reality–good products or services, and that you fill a market need. You’ve probably been studying your market, your prospects, and your business for how many ever years, and you have solutions that add value to John Smith’s life. So why, then, aren’t you making all the money you should be!!!?? Because you’re an expert at what you do, but you’re not a communications expert. This is a critical distinction.

So you say, “Well, I’ll focus my efforts on marketing so people will find out about us.” Hey, there are a whole host of books, workshops, and trainers that try to help you improve your “outside perception.” You’ve got books like Guerrilla Marketing, Marketing Warfare, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing… and you’ve got sales and marketing gurus galore that all try to help you make your business look good to the outside world. The problem is, that none of these books or trainers pay any attention to how good your business actually is.

But see, as advertising guru Rosser Reeves once said, “To be effective, you’ve got to make the product interesting, not just make the ad different.” Listen to me repeat that quote: “To be effective, you’ve got to make the product interesting, not just make the ad different.” And that’s what too many of the books, gurus, and agencies don’t yet understand.

Go to an ad agency or a media sales rep and they’ll both say the same thing. They’ll say “Just say bring me any old stupid product or service, a big bag of cash, and we’ll guarantee that we’ll spend all of it.” They put all their creative effort into trying to make the ad different, with no thought for the inside reality of the product or service.

Do you think that businesses fail because of bad marketing? There is certainly a lot of crummy marketing out there. But the real reason businesses fail is because they either have stupid business ideas in the first place, or aren’t ready to innovate their business so that it stays fresh and desirable to their target market.

For example, let’s look at the dot-com failures in 2000-2002 - Nobody wanted to buy pet supplies from the internet, so pets.com failed. Nobody wanted to buy wine off the internet, so wine.com failed. And so on. But there were plenty of money grubbing ad agencies and media outlets willing to take those big piles of cash that were stolen from stockholders and utterly waste it straight into their own pockets.

If you lost money in the dot-com meltdown, guess where the money went! It didn’t just disappear! It went from your hands to the dot-com’s hands, who took their multi-million dollar cut and passed the rest to the ad agencies, who took their 15% plus creative fees and passed it on to NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, and every other media outlet who then took it and bought Ferraris, Lamborghini’s, Porches, and $11 million homes. So now you at least know where your money ended up! All based on sorry inside realities. Rosser Reeves probably turned over in his grave 1000 times during the dot-com boom!

Many businesses are failing today because they were too slow to change their inside reality to meet the changing economy.  Look at real estate… According to the California Association of Realtors more than 57% of agents have found other careers between 2006 and 2008, and more are expected with the current economic conditions.  Those who are staying and making money are innovating their business and learning how to be good agents in a buyer’s market rather than a seller’s market.  They are also seeking lower commissions and working to assist the failing mortgage banking industry to sell foreclosed homes. 

You’ve got to work on both sides of your business–the inside reality and the outside perception. If you concentrate all your efforts on the “inside reality” but you don’t know how to do your marketing like I’m going to show you how in this series of articles, you’re setting yourself up for frustration. You’ll be pulling your hair out trying to figure out where YOUR big bag of money vanished to, or you’ll feel like the “best kept secret in town.” Or if you’re focusing all your efforts on the “outside perception,” -maybe you get your hands on some advertising or direct mail books, or maybe you hire an ad agency or let a media sales rep help out–that could lead to problems. Now you’ll have customers that hate your guts because you’re selling them a lie! You’ve got to balance this out and solidify both sides of your business.

Here’s what I’ve found over all of the years of doing marketing. Most businesses could stand some improvement in both areas…. but they struggle the most with the “outside perception,” or in other words… they’ve built good, solid companies–they offer good value–but with all of the competition that exists, they have problems differentiating themselves in the marketplace. Like I said, they’re not communications experts.

Regardless of your situation, or where you’re at now, that’s what the MYM system is all about… improving both the inside reality and the outside perception of your company. Part of the system deals with innovation and how to make your business competitive from a product, operations, and management standpoint - Then the system also deals with how to communicate and do the marketing–whether that be advertising, direct mail, web-based, or whatever–so that it effectively separates you from your competitors in the minds of the prospects.

The great business philosopher, Jim Rohn, probably summed it up best. He says to communicate powerfully, first, you’ve got to have something good to say; then, say it well; and finally, say it often. Does that make sense to you? Have something good to say, say it well, and say it often.

Chances are excellent that you’ve already got something good to say, and if not, innovation is an inevitable byproduct of implementing the Monopolize System. I’ll touch on innovation more later in this series. The MYM system then helps you improve the “outside perception” of your business, or in other words, how to say it well and say it often so people will instantly recognize you as the best choice. You become their no-brainer best decision.

Can you see why it’s imperative that these two factors be considered at the same time? Just teaching you how to innovate leaves you with a wonderful, innovative company that nobody knows about. Just teaching you sales or marketing or advertising techniques will drive in business that won’t stick around because there’s no value. You have to consider both the inside reality and the outside perception. This is the only program in existence that integrates these two important aspects of growing your business.

Stop and think for a minute: what is the inside reality of your business? What is the outside perception? Don’t consider what your current customers think about you so much–even though that’s important–consider most what your prospects think about you. Can they perceive that you’re any different or any better than their alternatives by looking at your ads? What about your brochures? What about your website? Chances are, they can’t. Which means even though your inside reality may be good, the outside perception is probably average, or worse… non-existent.

Go grab your marketing, look at your ads, take a look at your website, Is it instantly obvious specifically and quantifiably what makes you better and unique and different? Do you show your prospect how to judge your industry, what factors they need to consider when deciding, and how you provide value? You’ll realize as these concepts start to sink in that the crux of all the marketing problems that exist–including yours–can be wrapped up into one simple statement: Most company’s outside perception is not an accurate reflection of their inside reality. I’m going to repeat that one more time for emphasis: Most company’s outside perception is not an accurate reflection of their inside reality. What the MYM system does, first and foremost, is FIX THAT.

Tags: Marketing Tips // Add Comment »