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Greetings!
To be successful in business, you must appeal to potential clients who happen to have fall into four distinct Colors -- four completely different temperaments. This week begins with Green clients. What are THEY looking for in your business?
The YouTube video demonstrates clearly how Greens themselves deliver information and what they expect from their listeners.
We end with my own success story losing weight. My theme all year will be to re-visit our New Year's resolutions with gusto. Let this be the year we all reset our standards and stick to them! |
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Does Your Business Appeal to Green People - the Rationals? | |
For the next four weeks, I focus on Starbucks as a role model for businesses that hope to appeal to people of all four temperaments, the Four Colors. I have no connection whatsoever to Starbucks except as a customer with my own opinions. I chose Starbucks because it represents a business that maintains premium pricing in the middle of a grave recession, yet its raving fans remain loyal. How does Starbucks - or could ANY business - do it?
So if you are a rational, strategy-loving Green person, what about Starbucks will make you keep coming back?
First, hordes of customers are Green owners of laptops taking advantage of free wi-fi and combining online joy with a venue starkly different from a usual workspace, offering the promise of alone time even amidst a lively full house of conversation and coffee sipping nearby. How do you beat alone-time in free, independent office space with décor and an atmosphere you could never have at home?
The drinks and food at Starbucks titillate the mind for variety and personal choice. Witness the Bistro Boxes whose ingredients cater to several current diet fads - from high protein to high fiber, from fruit and cheese to yogurt parfaits. And then there are plenty of sugary carbs outside the Bistro Boxes for people who don't really care about calories or a life that lasts into the 90s. Unlike most coffee places, a Green person on a science-based diet plan will be grateful for the choices.
And of course coffee choices seem almost limitless, with stories attached to each - the country of origin, the eco-friendly processing, the reverence for fair labor practices, and the history of Starbucks itself.
Other than drinks and snacks, Starbucks appeals to an educated mind - selling not USA Today but instead the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The CDs for sale embody a musical repertoire that includes avant-garde albums, international fare, little-known talents of famous people, as well as incredibly hip compilations. Green folks are proud of their unique niches of knowledge and some of Starbucks' music definitely caters to those.
The sales procedures have to intrigue Greens. If you are using a gift card, the receipt will always tell you how much money is left on it - unlike most businesses with gift cards. The stark efficiency of minimal waiting is usually delightful - from the fast movement in the line itself, to the ordering, to the coffee making, to the delivery at the end of the counter. Green folk admire efficiency, especially when the end product is custom-ordered for one's unique tastes. Perhaps the topper is a recent campaign to brew any coffee you want on the spot and sell it to you as the less expensive, regular variety. How about THEM apples!
Speaking of efficiency, Green mothers with children on board and Green commuters on a timetable love Starbucks' drive-through stores.
So what about our own businesses? What will it be about our marketing and services that will surely get us new Green customers, loyal customers, and customers who rave so highly that they bring in their friends?
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GREEN MARKETING VIDEO ON "TED" | |
If there is an iconic Green website, it has to be TED. Notice in this very dense 19-minute presentation on "The Post-Crisis Consumer" how a Green lecturer nearly overwhelms you with graphs, stats, and useful inferences about new marketing directions to go with a business. The speaker, John Gerzema, provides many ideas for the listener to choose from and to formulate one's own conclusions. Remember that Green folks pride themselves in knowledge and competence but when it comes to "teaching," they would hope you, as student, would be creative and "figure things out" on your own.
 | | John Gerzema: The post-crisis consumer |
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Reviewing a New Years Resolution: How I am sticking to a weight-loss program
For the first time in nearly 10 years, I am MAKING IT HAPPEN with a weight-loss program.
Note: My success plan is not necessarily your success plan. The only weight-loss program that will truly work for you is the one that you will actually follow.
Here are my own rules for success:
1) When my ideal weight is reached, I will maintain it EASILY because losing the weight is also training me to enjoy the maintenance.
2) I will eat only delicious food, no compromises.
3) Getting fit with exercise (moving around) will be fun, doing what I really feel like doing on any given day.
4) With Blue and Orange as my first two Colors, I now understand that success will best happen with I join others on a regular basis and that I participate in some kind of competition with short-term deadlines, proof of progress, and the excitement of small rewards along the way.
5) Green is my third Color from which I access an ability to do enough research to choose a food regimen and exercise program that will flush out fat, especially when I feel like binge-eating but will choose the better foods to binge on.
6) Logistical Gold strengths I don't have many of, especially detail-orientation. However, when I'm meeting a deadline and I'm a pound or two short of the week's goal, I go GOLD. I get out the calorie counter, the pedometer, and reschedule my life down to the minute to ensure I remain on target. Don't get me wrong, I could never suffer through such a regimen every day for weeks at a time, but when the going gets tough, I GO GOLD.
7) I must become a life-long student of self-control, of willpower. The best book I have found is called The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal, probably the greatest book I've ever read. From it, I journal each week to reprogram my brain to set itself up for self-control and success. Once you realize that guilt trips about character, morals, and even laymen's psychology are wrong on many levels, and that the real challenge is our innate, ruthless physiology and lifetime of cultural programming, then you learn you can actually develop real self-control. I'll give just one example: "When we have been good for an extended time, we naturally feel we deserve to be bad for awhile." In the past, I would fast and abstain for a week, then blow the whole thing away with two or three days of binge-eating with high carbs, mountains of sugar, ample alcohol, and a vacation from exercise. Today, on the other hand, I maintain a much slower pace of fat reduction (thus fasting and abstaining less); I exercise by doing things I really enjoy; when I binge - and I do - I do "bad" things with enough mindfulness to choose the better "bad" foods and activities than I did before - and I find that the mindfulness limits the digressions to only a few hours or a day rather than longer term. Buy the book on Amazon.com. Don't get the electronic version. Buy the hardcover edition so you can mark it up and carry it around with you for a few months.
I conclude by screaming out that being fitter feels WONDERFUL this day.
Jack
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This really is YOUR newsletter. Send your stories and comments, please, to dermody@cox.net.
Sincerely,
Jack Dermody
JackDermody dot com |
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