Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

Dear Joe,

One word: sales.

Align employee interest in the brand with a highly
desirable outcome (a reward) in exchange for driving sales.

Or in exchange for improving customer relationships.

Or in exchange for generating higher levels of customer
retention, or spending per order.

Forget branding.

Many employees don't know what it is, don't care what it is,
and are not interested in it.

But they ARE interested in earning something of value, or in winning some kind of reward: paid vacation; tickets to a big league ball game; a free dinner for four; gift cards for an online retailer.

The more employees do to drive sales, the higher their pay off becomes.

The worlds of multi level marketing and affiliate marketing are great places to study this kind of thing, also known as "incentivized brand alignment": Mary Kay; Arbonne; Avon and PartyLite ALL do this and do it really well.

I know of one PartyLite sales rep who wins two or three trips to
the Caribbean PER YEAR. She's that good at driving sales. Her customers LOVE her and she loves them. Customers show their love by spending LOTS of money (on candles of all things), and she shows her love for them by giving them great offers—which are her incentives from her company to drive more sales.

Every time her customers receive many of their favorite things
for free, they feel compelled to thank her ... by spending more money. Her customers get free stuff, the sizes of their orders increase, sales go up, she gets rewarded, her employer makes more money and everyone is happy.

Action leads to reward, reward leads to revised attitude, revised attitude leads to more alignment, more alignment leads to more sales, more sales lead to more rewards.

Simple. Effective. Brilliant. Proven.

I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
The Direct Response Marketing Guy™
Wilmington, DE, USA

Hey Joe...

An idea can be surveying the target audience using something like surveymonkey.com (very widely used by pro marketers, and reliable)

Then the question becomes - who and where are the people to participate in the survey... that's the first step - identifying who you specifically want to help.

You can research networks around the web - perhaps facebook... once you clearly know you're speaking to the target audience engage them in a conversation and drive them to your survey... sometimes a valued piece of content or reward can be used as a call to action to get the most people to fill out the survey...

Once you do this you will have tons of data to structure content addressing the challenges and issues your target audience is experiencing...

I always remind myself to not talk about me or the products, but to talk to the target audience, find out their core issues and provide solution oriented content.

This builds trust, credibility and authority on the topic for you and your company.

Edelman's trust barometer for 2010 says 59% of people surveyed said they trust an expert on a topic more than any other information resource.

Hope this helps

Alan