Tag Archives: Marketing

The Journey to Better Marketing: Positioning

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When you create a positioning statement, you aren’t creating a product or service. You are creating a basis for everything you do. You are positioning your company in the minds of your potential customers. Positioning is your business’ true identity and its true value.

A positioning statement should say who you are, what business you’re really in, who buys your products or services, what they demand and what unique value you bring to them. Our second draft:

At Penguinate.com, we inspire happiness and creativity in professional adults by helping them embrace their inner child through our handmade stuffed animals and plush toys and their costumes.

Positioning statement, our second draft.

The positioning statement should address a real benefit the target audience wants that separates the business from its competition in a unique or difficult to copy way. Positioning should be benefit focused. Joy. Friendship. Travel. Penguins!

Idea adapted from “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 days.”

The Journey to Better Marketing: Archery, Aiming and the Niche

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“Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days” advises to find your niche. Your business needs to know who it wants to sell to in every key demographic, including gender, age, income level, when they do their shopping, where they do their shopping, do they have pets, and more. You don’t have to stalk your customers; you may ask them some questions. If you don’t have any customers, you want to just imagine who your ideal customer is. EVERYONE is not a niche, and EVERYONE is not your customer.

Once you have your niche, you want to aim your marketing at it. In archery, this is known as aiming small, which is a direct contrast to the phrase “aim big.” Because the bull’s eye is the smallest part of the target, the closer you can get to it the better. If you “aim big,” you might get the arrow in the general direction of the target, but you’re not likely to hit the bull’s eye. If you aim small, you’ll more likely get the hit you want.

In marketing for small businesses, you want to aim your marketing at specific people who are going to purchase your product or service. If you’re objective is to sell sweat-proof makeup to mimes in Las Vegas, as long as there are enough mimes in Vegas, you have a niche. If there aren’t enough mimes, you might want to extend it to stage performers or expand your mime reach to all of Nevada. Your niche needs to be large enough to provide you with an income, but small enough that the larger companies aren’t serving them. Take out your bow, string it, pull back your marketing arrow, and aim small.

The Journey to Better Marketing: Competitive Advantage

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Every business needs to have a competitive advantage. This is something that the business does that others do not, or it is something that the business talks about that others do not. It needs to be a positive benefit, communicated with a few well-selected words, and something that people will relate only to you.

So, what is our competitive advantage? Our penguins are unique from the norm; have you seen another white penguin on the market? They’re rare in the wild, too. Our penguins are also unique from each other. No two penguins look exactly the same because their eyes are hand-embroidered. Their height fluctuates within a half-inch because they are hand-sewn. How much stuffing gets used for different penguins is variable as well. Our penguins are also rare. They are handmade. We only have one maker, so supply is limited. For collectors, the rarity and uniqueness are benefits.

Nathaniel and Eudora Atwater, Steampunk Penguins
Nathaniel and Eudora Atwater, Steampunk Penguins

A second competitive advantage is that we can make penguins in costumes that can’t be found anywhere else. If someone wants a particular style of penguin or costume, Jenya can make it. We’ve done steampunk penguins as a special order.

A third advantage is our Penguin Passports. Our penguins are travelers. You can take them with you and use them for Instagram photos and fun while you travel. The passports reveal their names and their likes. These names are never the same.

This information is adapted from the 2005 version of “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days.” Get an updated version of “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days.”

The Journey to Better Marketing: Stuffed Animal Companies and What They Offer

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Who is our competition? What problems are they solving? What benefits are they offering?

I feel like these questions are really putting us in the position of Scrooge as he struggled against the Ghost of Christmas while trying to bonnet it. If it could be called a struggle when one side puts all his effort and might into overcoming the other, who is utterly unaffected by such exertions. Put me in the 100-yard dash with Usain Bolt, and I still don’t think he would call me competition.

Steiff Teddy Bears and Other Animals

So, is our competition Steiff?

Founded in 1880, Steiff is the world’s premier manufacturer of high-end toys and collectibles. Indeed, Steiff is the only “luxury” toy brand in the marketplace today. Internationally renowned for its exceptional quality, Steiff still utilizes traditional materials and proven manufacturing techniques to create its unique and highly prized products.

Steiff USA website.

Are they the only luxury toy brand in the marketplace as they claim? They use traditional materials and exceptional quality. What are the problems they are solving and benefits they are offering? They are soft, attractively priced, and from the original teddy bear company. Steiff is basically selling entrance into their exclusivity club and the ability of stuffed animals to return adults to the happier days of childhood. (A $1,295 Winnie the Pooh is labeled as for adults only.) They reach the children with animals around $20. Steiff sells nostalgia, collectability, and investment. Your children deserve the best; Steiff proclaims itself the best and has a history and collector base to back that claim. Steiff’s powerful commercial shows a teddy bear protecting a child from the dark.

Gotta Get a Gund

https://youtu.be/dwqFqCI6zuU

Founded in 1898, Gund had commercials in the 1980s. They were selling love and playfulness. Nowadays, they’re selling comfort, play, magic, heritage, quality, surprise, imagination, and love. Gund’s website sells bravery and love. Their products are huggable, and the company has been around for more than 100 years (like Steiff). Gund has stuffed animals under $10 and focuses more on their animals’ child friendliness vs. Steiff’s collectability, though both talk about how long their toys will last and are selling their heirloom status.

Ty, Inc. and Beanie Babies

Ty is the #1 plush manufacturer in the world (according to their job listings). Their Beanie Babies were so popular that Teenie Beanie Babies were featured in McDonald’s Happy Meals. People collected them throughout the 1990s, with some having thousands in their collection. Ty has capitalized on the lower income markets and built market share through their products appeal to people who don’t have a lot of money to spend on Steiff or even Gund. With a $2 Happy Meal, you get a Beanie Baby! That’s a pretty price point for anyone who’s hungry or has children; it’s also a way to get loyal customers for life. They are offering play and love as part of their Beanie Baby package! They push the collectibles a bit further by offering surprise toys in a series. The toys are hidden in a box, so you don’t know which one you’re going to get.

Stuffed Animals

The common theme for these companies is love. After all, how can you not love a stuffed animal. They make great friends, they are fun to play with, and they provide security to younger people. Being huggable is an important part of being a plushie.

Our Penguins

Our penguins are soft, cuddly, and fun. Their wings move, and they’re handmade, so every one of them is unique. Their expressions change based on how your emotions and how you perceive what they are doing. Even just standing on a shelf, our penguins speak volumes and tell a story that your heart needs to hear. You adopt our penguins; you don’t buy them.

So, our we competitors to these larger companies? We offer something none of them can compete with. Our stuffed animals are handmade with love. My wife makes them. There’s no large factory involved in our basic penguins. If you order one with clothes, those are handmade as well. Only some of the accessories, like buttons, may be purchased. Each animal is different because the eyes are hand-embroidered. Each set of eyes is designed and sewn differently. And the eyes are the window to the soul.

The Journey to Better Marketing: Know Your Goals

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The object of marketing is to get people to do something. It can be to donate to a cause. It can be to click on a link. It can be to buy a product or subscribe to a newsletter. Whatever it is that you want people to do is what your marketing should be directed it. If you don’t know the goal, you won’t be able to get people to do anything, and you won’t be able to measure what works and what doesn’t.

The goals need to be specific, so that they are easier to visualize and achieve. I want people to be more creative, be better problem solvers, experience more joy in life, learn something new, and be happier. Those aren’t goals that I can measure. They may also not be specific enough.

Buy a Penguin

So, how can I help people to achieve those things? If you buy a stuffed penguin, will you be happier? I hope so. I know how happy they’ve made me. So, the first goal is to sell stuffed penguins.

Buy a Book

If you buy one of my books, will you be happier? I hope so. “The Pirate Union” is a comedy. “The Adventures on the Amur” are like the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys stories. The creativity books are designed to help you become more creative and be better problem solvers. “Polly Penguin Wants to Fly” and “There Are No Penguins in Alaska” are supposed to be fun. So, the second goal is to sell books.

Patreon, Blog, and Email List

Will supporting our Patreon, reading my blog, or joining our email list help you achieve those goals of creativity, joy and problem solving? On Patreon, you get short stories and penguins that should be comforting and funny. The blog will bring about new information that you may not already know, and our email list will make sure you don’t miss anything on the blog. It’s all an attempt to bring you more joy and creativity.

Other Goals

We’ve recently changed our slogan to “Joy. Friendship. Travel. Penguins!” That’s what we want to bring to this world in as many ways as possible. But again, they aren’t easily measured.

Are the goals I have currently too many? They need to be realistic, and I need to make sure that I don’t get overwhelmed with too many of them or with goals that are too large. Goals that are too easy or too hard aren’t realistic. You need to stretch yourself, without breaking, to achieve success. You need to believe that you can achieve the goals.

Books, coffee, penguins, Disney, travel and creativity are things that bring me happiness. I want the freedom to explore, create and build, so I can bring that happiness to you.

So, what are good goals to set? That’ll depend on the month and the activities we’ve got going on.

Adapted from the 2005 version of “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days.” Get the updated version of “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days.”

The Journey to Better Marketing: Get the Right Mindset

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“You can’t sell a product or service no one knows about (Levinson and Lautenslager, p. 2).” This is what I am confronted with every day in every conversation. We have great penguins and books, but how do we get people to find out about them? Marketing starts with your mindset. It requires energy, enthusiasm and passion. Every action, especially for an individually owned business, is a part of marketing. How people see you will transfer to how they view your business. In their book “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days,” the question that Levinson and Lautenslager say every member of the organization should ask themselves is “How am I building awareness with my prospects and clients through our marketing?”

I typically ask myself, “How do I best move forward?” Sometimes, it’s by creating something new – a book or an article. Sometimes, it’s by posting or reposting something to social media, and sometimes, I can’t answer that question at all because I am wondering how do I best stay afloat. It’s a balancing act – we have to cover our current moment and figure out how to move forward for the future. I don’t recall the two ever coming together.

Our marketing needs to be tied to our mission statement: Joy. Friendship. Travel. Penguins! That’s the closest we’ve got to a mission statement. It’s more of a slogan, I guess.

The first step in marketing, like creativity and any other activity, is believing that you can. Your actions will make a difference. Once you have this locked in, you can keep doing the activities you need to do in order to market. Those activities like laundry, dishes, and breathing, never stop.

One way to learn more about marketing is to simply observe what is already around us. Look at the emails that are spam: Which do you open and why? Which do you delete without opening? What works? Why do you open one and not the other? Adapt the successful ones to your business.

Always think about the customer. It’s not what you offer or what the features are; it’s what the benefit is for the person getting the product. Our penguins are soft, but that’s a feature. The benefit of a soft penguin is that you have someone who feels good to hold. Our penguins can comfort you and relieve stress (benefits) because there are no hard parts that can hurt you (features). Always discuss benefits. How do our penguins or books help improve your life?

This information has been adapted from “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days” from 2005. You can get an updated version through this affiliate link for “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days” from 2014.

What Do I Need to Do Better? A History

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When I first started Penguinate.com in 2012, it was because I learned that people who were able to talk to classmates or others on the job were able to reinforce their learning. They retained more information and learned more than people who had to rely on themselves and their memory to learn. I was going to Disney World to be a part of their College Program, and I wanted to remember everything that I learned there. Not knowing if I would find people to talk to, I decided to start a website where I could keep my observations and put down what I learned, giving myself one more way to remember what I deemed as important and one more connection to tie the information to my brain.

I monetized the website, and as I went through school, I created movie and book reviews. When I started at examiner.com as a reporter, I posted videos on YouTube to support the news I was reporting. I monetized those as well. By the time I went to get my Master’s degree, I was making just enough to pay for my Internet usage, and all indications were that it would keep growing if I kept at it. Then everything changed.

When YouTube changed its policy about who could monetize their videos, I was on the outside looking in. I lost half of my web income. When my website hosting company decided to eliminate contact with Russia, I lost half of my income again. Then I made the drastic decision to move website hosting companies, and my income dropped to almost zero. I thought I had things moving in the right direction when I took another hit in August, my worst month at my website financially speaking, even though I was in the midst of a 251-day publishing streak. September responded in a “hold my beer” fashion, and I’m staring at two months of unexplained decline in income from my website – even while September was my best for “ads served.”

In the midst of all this, I turned to writing books as an additional source of income. My wife has made penguins to help supplement what we’re making. I’ve tried freelance editing with two paid jobs and one that didn’t pan out but kept me from working in September. I’ve started publishing at Medium, where I earn based on the number of views by members and their interaction with the articles I write. I’ve attempted to expand our Patreon base and failed with every offer that I’ve put out there. I have a small but mighty core of supporters. I tried starting an email list – my wife and I are the only ones on it, which makes it a lot less work. We’ve made two calendars – one of which we’ve offered for free to our Patreon members.

So, this is where we are – facing crickets with our web presence and our ability to get the word out about what we have available. I’ve gotten messages about how people love my books. Our penguins have gotten great reviews – in private, so it can’t be the products that are the problem. That leads me to believe my biggest issue is marketing. How do I inform people about what we have available and how they go about getting it?

I have read about marketing, watched videos about it, and participated in courses about it, but for some reason, there’s a block. Either I’m not using the things I have learned, or I am using them ineffectively. I’m not sure where the disconnect is, but it must be somewhere within me, or between me and the computer. Somehow, I’m not translating what I’ve read and thought about into something productive for me. It’s a lot of wheel spinning as I use social media and Google ads to little or no avail. How do I do it better?

If I am right, and marketing is the main problem, then it’s time for me to return the blog portion of the website back to what it was built for – to help me learn. It’s time for me to start going through the marketing materials I’ve already read once, and re-read it with an eye to distilling it down to the main points: Benefits marketing, tell-a-story marketing, and other marketing tactics. Whatever type of marketing I need to learn, it’s time to buckle down and do the research and figure out how to turn it into something usable.

And after all this talking, the one thing I probably need to learn most of all is to how to listen. People may have been telling me things that I have missed. Since I have missed them, I don’t know what they are.

If you have any ideas, please leave them in the comments.

The Problem with ‘the Single’ in Disney’s Movie Business

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In his examination of Disney’s “Dumbo,” “Forbes” writer Scott Mendelson laments the Disney Company’s penchant for releasing big budget films that have already been made, including the live-action remakes of animated classics and the multiple sequels that Disney has released over the course of roughly the last decade, and while he acknowledges that the studios are in part to blame, he also lays the blame on movie goers. “The studios can’t responsibly green-light what they know audiences will not go to see in theaters.”

The Dollars and Sense of It All

In 1984, when Michael Eisner became CEO of the Disney Company, the top grossing movie was “Beverly Hills Cop” with almost $235 million and $316 million worldwide. Disney’s movie releases were in the tank and not making what they should be with a few exceptions. In 1984, Touchstone’s “Splash” opened at No. 1 on the chart and grossed over $69 million (Box Office Mojo) by the time it finished its run; it cost $8 million to make. The film was a huge success at the time, and it brought in about $62 million profit.

Eisner looked at the situation and decided that Disney and its movie making companies would make smaller budget films that would make money rather than hope for a summer blockbuster that could fail. They were going to hit singles rather than try for homeruns. In 1986, “Ruthless People,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” and “The Color of Money” were released with grosses of $71, $62 and $52 million making them the 9th, 11th and 12th highest grossing movies of the year. Eisner’s strategy was successful, and Disney carved out a niche with these low budget, over-performing types of films.

Flash forward to 2018 and the surprise hit (not Disney) “A Quiet Place.” With a budget of $17 million dollars, this is the type of film Disney would’ve happily made in the 1980s. The movie made $340 million dollars worldwide ($323 million profit). Marvel’s “Black Panther” cost about $200 million to make and brought in over $1.3 billion; domestically, it was the top grossing film of the year. It would take about three “A Quiet Place” size releases to make the same amount of profit as “Black Panther.” However, “Black Panther” was a surprise in its own way.

Marvel’s sure thing for the year was “The Avengers: Infinity War” – a sequel, which according to the just over $2 billion box office gross, you’re probably familiar with. The estimates for the cost of the film run between $300 million and $400 million. Even on the high side of the estimate, the film brought in $1.6 billion, or the rough equivalent of five “A Quiet Places.”

I understand these numbers aren’t exact. There are marketing costs to consider as well as what the actual theaters make, which is different depending on the country. However, the point is it doesn’t make any sense for a company that brings in $12.6 billion (2018 net income) to worry about $10 or $20 million, the budget of “A Quiet Place” for a return of only $323 million. As Mendelson pointed out, Disney had taken risks with “Tomorrowland” (profit at a scant $20 million), “The Finest Hours” (losses estimated at $20 million), and “The Queen of Katwe” (estimated loss of $5 million). These movies didn’t return enough profit to justify their existence.

Other Sources of Income

When “Star Trek” dolls were released and the series ended, the sales of the toys dried up as well. There wasn’t anyway to remind people about the purpose of the toys without the show. When “Star Trek: The Next Generation” returned the Star Trek universe to television, toy sales skyrocketed.

In 1983, Funimation released “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” after Reagan deregulated children’s programming. The show was designed to sell He-Man action figures. Once it made it on the air and He-Man sales sky-rocketed every toy company got involved in Saturday Morning Cartoons: “Transformers,” “Go-Bots,” “M.A.S.K.,” “Jem and the Holograms,” and “G.I. Joe” to name a few. Whether the show or the action figures came first is of little consequence, what mattered was that some of the cartoons were pulled from the air not because of the cartoons’ popularity, but because the toys lacked sales.

Disney’s synergistic approach to marketing means the media giant isn’t looking just at the movies. It’s also looking at what it can make from tie-ins. Dumbo’s new movie release, regardless of how it’s received, sells more stuffed Dumbos. Marvel’s movies sell more superhero action figures, Lego sets, and whatever else they put their characters on. These things all bring in more money. Disney princesses outsell Barbie now are a multi-billion-dollar market segment. Their inclusion in “Ralph Breaks the Internet” keeps them fresh, updates them for this generation and keeps the product moving. The Disney company not only needs to create movie sequels and remakes because they are smaller financial risks, but also because they sell more toys, products and Disney park experiences.

What’s It All Mean?

There’s no incentive for Disney to green-light smaller film projects, even if they become the next “A Quiet Place.” The movie industry can only stand so many new films before there aren’t enough movie-goers to see them all. Worse, people say they want new stories, but they only think they want new stories. Audiences still flock to their favorite characters and movie franchises because its an acceptable risk. To spend $10 to $15 on a movie that you may not like or know nothing about doesn’t make much sense when you know that Marvel (or DC or Pixar) has a release right around the corner.

Moreover, Disney can make more money from product friendly franchises that it can tie into its theme parks than it ever could from a movie that has to stand on its own two legs. This all becomes more problematic with Disney’s recent acquisition of 20th Century Fox, and it’s looming control of 40 to 50 percent of the box office. The studios will have to schedule movies so they don’t cut into each other’s profits, which will mean fewer movies and fewer opportunities for a smaller film to get made.

For more on the Disney Company, preorder “Penguinate! The Disney Company.”