On Being Remarkable

I've been reading recently about how our businesses need to stand out - to so impress, that we become "remarkable" - worthy of mention within our customer (and prospect) community.

It reminds me of a story from my past.

A decade ago, I ran a small B2B Direct Marketing department. Our company primarily sold safety signs, labels and tags (and other OSHA compliance products) by catalog.

Our challenge was this. As every direct marketer will tell you, we mail and mail our catalogs until the mailing campaign becomes unprofitable. You never want to miss a potential sale and so you tend to carpet bomb your customers with the same (or only slightly changed) catalogs over and over again.

If you happened to be a "current customer" you were especially vulnerable to these tactics!

In actual fact, we were training our best customers to ignore our catalogs because we were mailing so frequently.

Now here's the dilemma we faced. In an attempt to better position ourselves within our market, we undertook a huge product line expansion. At stake, was whether our customers would even notice. Had we trained them to ignore us?

Our goal was to get our best customers to notice our new book AND to take the time to glance through all the new products.

Our catalog size had increased by over 150 pages (to a total of 384). Knowing that customers spend no more than 3 seconds glancing at a catalog page, if we wanted them to see all our products, we needed to hold their attention for almost 20 minutes!

We knew that we had to do something "remarkable".

So we sent a "coffee break" to our best customers.

We created a gift package that contained a high end mug with our logo, along with samples of tea, coffee, sugar, powdered creamer and shortbread cookies along with an advanced copy of our new catalog. And to make sure it got noticed, we sent it by FedEx.

Upon opening the gift, our customers uncovered a letter inside the box stated that our catalog contained so many new products that it would take at least 15 minutes to browse - so we felt it only fair that we send along a coffee break as well.

Based upon the subsequent sales and comments received by our customer service department, our strategy of trying to be "remarkable" proved to be a good one. Being remarkable works.

When is the last time your company was "remarkable"?