In
the spring of 1971, I was invited to attend three real estate seminars
put on by the same Florida home developer. I attended all three. In
fact, after the first one, I couldn’t wait to attend the next
two!
Was I interested in buying
a lot or home in Florida in 1971?
No.
Was I interested in buying
a lot or home in Florida in the foreseeable future?
No.
Was I pre-qualified by
anyone on the phone for this developer regarding my interest in Florida
real estate or home development to gauge my level of interest?
No.
Did I get any follow up
phone calls between each of these dinners to find out what kind of
prospect they had?
No.
Could I have afforded a
lot, even if I had become interested as a result of the seminars?
(I was a school teacher making $7100 a year, but no one asked me what
I did or ever had me fill out even a basic information card.)
No.
They simply kept inviting
me back and I kept on showing up.
Why, you’re thinking,
did I attend? Simple. You probably guessed.
They put on the best steak dinner you could eat—with all the
trimmings including key lime pie dessert—prior to the seminar.
And best yet, it was FREE! They had me salivating to attend because
they marketed the “sizzle of the steak” so well.
They didn’t market
Florida lots with a sizeable discount, didn’t market homes with
outstanding upgrades if you bought one now, didn’t market lower
than prime rate interest programs to help you buy the lot and maybe
your home. They didn’t get me “salivating” for buying
a lot or second home in Florida.
They marketed free steak
dinners, in big red capitalized letters in every ad they ran promoting
these seminars. By the size of the crowds attending these seminars,
they were very successful marketing free steak dinners.
I wasn’t very surprised
to learn that in the mid-70’s, they went bankrupt. No wonder.
They had a great marketing scheme, but not for selling land or homes
in Florida. If they had been smart, they should have capitalized on
what they had learned, and invested their marketing budget in a first
class steak house in our neighborhood. At least they would have capitalized
on what they had learned—how to market great tasting steaks and
turn out a crowd to enjoy and pay for them.
The first lesson of successful
marketing in any industry is, If you’re gonna “sell the
sizzle of the steak”, you’d better sell the steak. Have
you ever invested in a marketing scheme, turned out a crowd, but didn’t
sell the steak? Most of us in business have done that, and worse,
repeated the same marketing mistake.
Marketing, no matter what
medium we use, should not only turn out prospects, it should pave
the way for selling the goods or services.
© Copyright 2001 by Allan Nosel.
All rights reserved.
Allan
Nosel
was the Founder and President of TNT Training, a New York-based management
and marketing consulting firm. He was the author of
Igniting Passion, Punch and Profits in Your Tradeshow Process.
He was one of Richard Bradley's closest frends—they spent over
300 hours together in a bass boat fishing the lakes of the Adirondacks.
He died Dec. 22, 2002 at the much too young
age of 55.
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