McCurry Associates Marketing Idea Exchange Archives

Volume 17 - August 22, 2002

Bill McCurry McCurry Associates wmccurry@mccurryassoc.com 609 688-1169

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Idea #1 - Christmas in August
Why wait for Christmas?

Chris Lydle, CPC - Chris' Camera Center South - Aiken, SC - www.chriscamera.com

   If your new digital hybrid lab has Christmas Card template capability (and if it doesn't, why not?) this is the time of year to start touting its capabilities.
   Take a few hours driving around town and take good photos of businesses with your digital camera. Paste the photos into a card template that you've made up for your own home town. If you don't know the name of the owner or manager of each business, find out. On a Post-It note, write something like this:    

Took this photo with a digital camera from the store and printed it on our brand new lab. Pretty neat, eh?

Regards, Chris    

   If your name isn't Chris you might have to edit the copy. Put it in an envelope with your business card, hand address it and mail it to him.

   No sales pitch is included, but Danny now knows that

   A) you sell digital cameras
   B) you make great prints from digital cameras
   C) you can make a great Christmas card for his business.

   If you do 10 a week through September that's about 80 people who will know about the service, and your total cost will be under $50.

   You can see a sample of this process and more details at Chris Lydle's website: www.photoimagenews.com/xmasjuly.htm

Idea #2 - Ted Dickens, Oxford One Hour Photo

   I think the hardest part about marketing for non-marketing folks is to keep at it. I go to a seminar, get great ideas and all charged up -- then get back to the real world and get slogged under. Guerillas rarely operate in the kind of vacuum a sole-proprietor would think of as normal.

   It's a challenge. The people close enough to meet regularly are probably close enough to be considered a competitor. We probably need to recognize that our true competitors are the chain-store labs -- not each other!

   I'm seriously considering advertising free baby announcements, with as few strings as possible. My goal is to get something that is easy to advertise, not too expensive, but will get people through the door for the first time. If it works, I'll share the results with the newsletter.

   Comment from Bill McCurry: Ted's comment, "get back to the real world and get slogged under" really hits home. What seems to work for successful marketers is to commit to doing only one thing . . . and then accomplishing that one thing before committing to doing more. Too many people set themselves up to fail by listing 25 things they are going to change and then doing none of them. Michael St. Germain lives by this quotation, "Continuous improvement beats delayed perfection."

   Rich Reed (issue 15-08/07/07) talked about how he can reconstruct lost data for clients. If it is on a Promaster memory card it is done at no charge for the client. Other clients are charged between $10 and $25. Several people asked where he got the program to do this. His response:
http://home.arcor.de/christian_grau/dir/ go to this page and go for it - this should be all you need. email me if you need more. Richreedscameras@aol.com    

   Jim Schwarzbach reports back on his own idea from newsletter issue #14, July 31.
Jim Schwarzbach, Jim's Photo Lab, El Paso, Texas

   That idea begot another idea - every time they order prints from digital, we now enclose a thank you certificate. (We never call them coupons, that's what grocery stores use. We always use certificates as that implies more value and importance) from Kodak/Fuji/Agfa/Mitsubishi/Konica (whoever your Kiosk or paper supplier is) for 5 free prints with their next order of 20 or more prints.

   When I read this, I thought "Why give away five reprints (120 square inches of paper), when you can give away a 5X7 enlargement (35 square inches) instead?" Now our offer is a free enlargement, a $4.00 value, instead of $2.50 worth of reprints.    

   Paul Singer, Photo Image Works, Cirencester, England (www.photoimageworks.co.uk)

   (from newsletter #16, August 14) A word on shredding photos - CD-R's that have been returned / failed QC or whatever need to be destroyed entirely before binning them! We realised we were (occasionally) throwing out CD-R's with data on them! If you cannot break them up then usually a permanent marker over the recordable surface will do the trick.

   (For the Yankees that don't speak "English" the term binning them refers to relocating them to the rubbish bin - or as an unsophisticated Yankee would say, "tossing them out". And yes, "realised" is also "true" English.)