a million $$$$ idea

[greenoak]

todays best story from a customer was from a business guy and master craftsman who does high end design and installations in homes...like super fancy bathrooms....he was doing a shower with tons of rain heads,?, and hed designed a big mosaic on the floor...etc etc....the drain ruined his central design so he needed a perimiter drain...no can find....and now he has the idea and the patent and the investor and the manufacturing ready to go....and already turned down big money for the idea...
he turned down an early buy out, i guess for the same reason shown in the facebook movie....
i just thought, there he is making a big move and my efforts are about showing a 25$$ window to someone...our business is like a turtle and sometimes i get to see a wonderful rabbit idea.... maybe i should think of franchising...lol..

[jamesray50]

I had a client at the CPA firm I worked at that came over from Europe with an idea to sell a shower/tanning combination stall. It was all the rage in Europe. Mostly in the high end hotels. It was a shower stall with tanning bulbs in it, came in several styles and you could get a tan while you were showering. He had several investors in his company, but after a couple of years he never sold a one. He ended up going bankrupt, left town owing us money and we never knew where he went. Weird how something will do good in one part of the world and not the other.

[Spider]

It's never the product, it's the selling. You can take the most ludicrous idea and, with the right selling, make it successful. Look at Ron Popiel - what's so brilliant about a chicken rotisserie? Or spray on hair coloring for men with a bald patch? An Inside-The-Shell Egg Scrambler? A Smokeless Ashtray? An electric Food Dehydrator?

Popiel sold his company, Ronco in 2006 for $55 million.

[greenoak]

i know that happens ....but do you really believe that spider? except for the egg scrambler i can see pretty good points a bout the products you mentioned...... i never quite believe that...rather i think most success comes from the quaALITYL OF the product or value of the idea ...then doing a good job in making it a reality.... having something worthwhile or at least wanted is very very important...imho........ do you think your plumlbing business would have made it if you werent any good at it and just had great selling? look at facebook....it soared without any marketing.... it was just a great product.... [i just saw the movie]
...but this drain is more like the zom...it will be real attractive and will serve a big saftey need, thats the inventors view of it anyway....
i dont know who would want a shower tanning combination.....that is kind of odd ..i wouldnt have invested in that....

[businesscrazy83]

I have to agree with spider. When your selling products MOST of the time is all about marketing and advertising. Its rare, but does happen, to have something take off. The perimiter drain is a good idea but will it catch on?

[greenoak]

i probably come from a different business......whats good here is long term, sellling to the same folks over and over and radiating out from there..... the experience and good word of mouth were the things that pushed our growth ...into a real income and 30 yrs of profit...i figure the ads and billboards do play a part for getting new folks in...but if its a big bore for them when they do come then the ads were a waste.... you have to think long term and happy customers too..
.to me its kind a marketing myth from the marketers......that undervalues your product and your work in that area...
selling one thing on line to new people all the time would be a diffferent story..
.i know the best thing doesnt always win...but there are a lot of reasons...bad target, not enough money, wrong personality, bad timing, bad location, lady luck..wrong price .etc etc
the guy is going to be doing the major shows,,,,so we will see.... he thinks it will be major for nursing homes....

[Spider]

i know that happens ....but do you really believe that spider? except for the egg scrambler i can see pretty good points a bout the products you mentioned...... i never quite believe that...rather i think most success comes from the quaALITYL OF the product or value of the idea ...then doing a good job in making it a reality.... having something worthwhile or at least wanted is very very important...imho........ do you think your plumlbing business would have made it if you werent any good at it and just had great selling? ....Nothing - NOTHING - succeeds without selling. My plumbing company was the only plumbing company in the region that could handle major construction projects (and I made sure we handled them well), but we still had to win every bid by being the lowest. And I still had to network heavily (which is itelf a form of selling.)

Try searching for "high class furniture, bankrupt" and see a number of high class furniture manufacturers and suppliers going bankrupt. Quality is not a guarantee of success in business. Wal-Mart is a sure example of that, if their detractors are to be believed! In fact, Wal-Mart proves the argument that selling is everything.

Not many on this forum, it seems, thinks that Microsoft makes a quality browser (or anything else, for that matter.) But Microsoft is undoubtedly the most successful software company and many have regarded it as the most successful company that has ever been. Selling!

GE? IBM? You name it... they won by selling their way to the top. Indeed, your own business, Ann - isn't your success due to your ability to sell? You sell quality to the quality-minded and junk (forgive me! you call it 'In the Rough') to those who are looking to do their own refurbishing, perhaps.

And pet rocks? I really believe you can be successful at selling anything - you only need to fulfill the needs of the purchaser. Indeed, that's all there is to being successful in business. That's all that is required of you.

[Spider]

....i know the best thing doesnt always win...but there are a lot of reasons...bad target, not enough money, wrong personality, bad timing, bad location, lady luck..wrong price .etc etc....But those are simply examples of bad selling. trying to sell to a disinterested market, targetting the wrong people, using selling techniques poorly, trying to well at the wrong time, etc.

[greenoak]

EXACTLY...YOU CAN GO BAD IN SO MANY WAYS..thats why the huge majority of start ups dont make it past year 5....i see how you can call all that selling.... and its things the owner had better figure out before callilng in the ad guys.............
and you are so right my job is selling and selling when they get here.... but i totally want them happy when they remember buying from me too on down the road......calling some of it junk not a problem....its a good part of our thing...and one mans junk is anothers treasure....most true antiquers are total snobs of course.... . .
spider i totally believe in selling too..i dont go for guerilla, i go way more expensive than that in my marketing.... i believe in it...we just bought 3500 first class stamps for this weeks big event...and we gladly pay our billboard bills.... .we spend a fortune on it...less now tho,,with facebook!!!
i m hoping for a great weekend.... mail to 3500, email to 1800, facebook to 1265,, and 50$$$ worth of facebook ads to thousands and thousands...and down to just 2 newspaper ads... ...

[Nomad]

Not everything sells, even with good marketing. I do believe, however, that a great product can never make it if marketed incorrectly. Products are marketed because they fit a specific niche or create a niche. Marketing gets them noticed, but if they are designed for the wrong market, not functional the way that consumers expect, not priced right or a plethora of other factors... no go.

There is a good book (not great, but pretty good) called "The Carey Formula: Your Ideas Are Worth Millions" written by Barbara Carey. She's the one who invented the haragami, bloombra, and a whole bunch of other "As Seen On" TV type niche products. Interesting read and story of how she went from rags to riches creatiing products and selling them. Discusses some of her failures, too. Fairly good motivational book, although she she stands on a soap box a lot and beats her own chest. If you can get past that, it's an interesting read.

[Harold Mansfield]

look at facebook....it soared without any marketing.... it was just a great product.... [i just saw the movie]


I haven't seen the movie yet ( it's still siting in my Amazon que), but Facebook had plenty of marketing and investment. Not sure what stage of development and growth the movie touched on, but it wasn't exactly
done on bootstraps. There was significant investment of capitol, not to mention a well publicized purchase by Microsoft for over $200 million for a 1.6% share. Facebooks most significant recent growth period was done with a crap load of money.

[Spider]

Not everything sells, even with good marketing...I am of the opinion that you can sell anything, if the selling is done correctly. Now, determining how to sell it correctly might be particularly difficult, but I do not believe it would be impossible. Who on earth would want an In-The-Shell egg scrambler and how on earth would you sell them? Ron Popiel invented one and sold them, so there are/were people who wanted an In-The-Shell egg scrambler!

Just this minute I tried to think of something ridiculous to prove a point - I came up with a five-legged chair. Who would want a five-legged chair, I thought. Well, every single entry of the first two pages of a Google search for five-legged chair were about five-legged chairs! So there are plenty of people out there making, selling and people buying five-legged chairs!

If you can think of it, there will be people who want one. Finding them and selling to them must, therefore, be possible.

[Nomad]

Spider, I agree that you can sell anything to someone. However, there is a difference between something that is a success and something that just "sells". To have lasting power and impact, the product must: 1) fulfill a need 2)work as expected 3)be more efficient than it's competitor 4) be at a price point that consumers think makes sense compared with the alternatives. I can think of several other points, as well.

I can probably think of ANYTHING and get SOMEONE to buy it. But, whether I can make a lot of people buy it, and manufacture it at a price where I can make a profit after my costs are taken into account, is another story.

In theory, I agree with you... someone can sell anything that is conceived. However, we would be misleading entrepreneurs if we told them that anything they came up with was a good, marketable, self-sustaining idea. The world is littered with snake-oil salesmen who were slick, could "sell ice to an eskimo" and were broke quick thinking they could make riches by hocking cheap junk.

My suggestion is that if you have what you think is a good idea, figure out what it would cost for you to make money after your production, advertising and marketing expenses; define your target market and treat it like a business.

Even Ronco, as stupid as some of those items are, makes like more efficient with their products. Pet rocks and Silly Bands sold because they were a fad, symbol of being part of the "in crowd" and they were cheap. The Flobie raked in mega bucks because it saved people money, and yes--- your 5 legged chair idea makes sense if you look at the pictures (because it's not 5 long standing legs, it's a 5 leg base which helps with stability-- so it is an OSHA based ergonomic solution).

On the other hand, there are countless-- and I mean that almost literally-- ideas that never worked well. Regardless of whether they were marketed right or not-- they just didn't make sense to enough people to be profitable.

I worked heavily with quarter billion dollar marketing department in one of my past professional lives and I can tell you that it consumers aren't ready or receptive... it just aint gonna work.

But, that's the beauty of forums. If we all had the same opinion on ideas... that wouldn't set any of us apart... right? All these differing opinions are what makes the entrepreneurial world tick! Just my 2 cents... and I have always said, "I may be wrong... I've been wrong before. But, sometimes I've also been right... except when I disagree with my wife :-)"

[Spider]

When I said "selling" I meant to do it successfully. Unsuccessful selling (in the context of a business forum) is not really selling, is it? To me, if you were unsuccessful at selling, that means you didn't sell. What I'm getting at is, it is never the product, it is the salesman (team, staff, strategy, whatever.)

I don't disagree with what you said, for the most part, but I think the failings you describe are failing in the selling, not failings in the product. A product (goods or service) is just a product. It doesn't matter if it is good or bad, of high quality or junk, prractical or whimsical - it's just a product, and as such it is neither successful or unsuccessful. It's the selling that makes it successful and the selling that fails if it is not successful.

I cannot stress enough that business is selling. I think it was Peter Drucker (one of those chaps!) that said the sole purpose of a company is to find the next customer - the sole purpose - because without the next customer, all the benefits to society that business conveys cannot happen.

[Nomad]

Point well taken. I also agree that many business failures come down to not selling correctly. I always tell business owners that we are all salesmen. Whether you are in direct sales, marketing, management, or almost any other facet of a business-- your success often comes down to how well you have sold your idea. For example, even a pharmacist has to "sell" a physician on whether one drug is better than another in a certain therapeutic situation, a manger must sell his or her manager on the business plan for the department, a small business owner must sell EVERYONE on why to patronize their business, etc. I have seen good people fail because they didn't sell their ideas well to others. I think we are in agreement on that... my previous comments were more related to the idea that everything is not a viable business, no matter how well you market it. But, I understand and agree with your point-- which I think is-- it often comes down to the fact that many business owners fail because they just don't market and have selling skills nearly as good as their creative skills, etc.

[Spider]

Indeed! I would take it one step further - the failure of selling need not necessarily be a lack of competence. We may be stepping into the unknown.

If we are talking of inventions and selling what never existed before, it might require a selling technique or strategy that has never been done before. I don't think all inventors since the beginning of time were incompetent because they didn't invent this thing before, any more than salespeople can be held incompetent because they can't figure out how to sell this new invention.

Everybody can sell. Not everybody can choose the right technique or strategy for a given product.

[greenoak]

the neat part about this story to me was that the guy was in a successful business already and established and able to grow his wild new idea with a patent, an investor, a marketing plan and a manufacturer..... we all get ideas all the time...i do anyway....but so far none of mine have been sought after and nobody has ever offered me a million $$$$...

and really spider~ my teeny little point~~~ i have to think if you were a lousy plumber or lousy bidder or lousy picker of workers or a lazy guy that your business wouldnt have been so great no matter what marketing you did....
i think i do great marketing ~ i believe in marketing, but our store is no pet rock, its been there and is there for the long haul... ....i think what we offer is even more important than our good marketing.... ...
heres a marketing example for you...BRIGHTON jewelry....its a huge huge success and not even sterling....the fans think its great and its not even out of a good metal... you could get real silver earrings for what they charge.... their m arketing is wonderful....

[Spider]

... heres a marketing example for you...BRIGHTON jewelry....its a huge huge success and not even sterling....the fans think its great and its not even out of a good metal... you could get real silver earrings for what they charge.... their m arketing is wonderful....Haven't you just proven my point?

[greenoak]

yes, i did that on purpose.... and i wasnt against it..i see it too.....and said that a while back.... i know lots of examples...
. but i still think your quaility counts......and often just as much or more than your marketing........thats my point...in fact your quality can get you the best marketing there is: imho.... good buzz, good reputation and good credit and a loyal following....lofty goals for sure...... ...

[Patrysha]

Uh but you do realize that all that internal stuff is marketing too.

Marketing is much much more than just advertising...any marketer worth their weight is going to start by keying in on getting those internal parts working to near perfection before any outside. I know I am currently working on that at the restaurant I work at. We can barely handle the workload of minimal advertising...there are things that need to be more efficient, staffing & training issues that need to be addressed before any additional outside marketing is brought into the picture.

[greenoak]

i guess you can call everything marketing if you want to.... .we probably have different definitions...
i love business stories and will be glad to hear from him again.... ..hes not at the marketing stage yet.
.. ..

[greenoak]

eborg...according to the movie it was wildly popular before anyone besides the roommate invested in it..
..it was a neat movie but i read that the dad said it wasnt very accurate about marks personality.......

[Patrysha]

i guess you can call everything marketing if you want to....

It is encompassed in the definition as provided in the several university textbooks on marketing and commerce I've read. Inventors and other small business owners would be well served if they started with marketing basics as soon as they thought of an idea...market research, for example. I think it's a symptom of leaving the marketing till last that businesses suffer more than necessary during the start up and growth phases...

[greenoak]

most stores i know do market research all the time...but we dont call it marketing....marketing to me is what we do with the info when we try to reach out into the market.......
for example , i do market research every time i walk thru the store and see what didnt sell.... its a big part of my job, and when i go to a buying trip i use that research and any other insights that help me buy right...and i read everything i can and network network ...thats all internal tho.not something you could do for me, ...just a natural part of running a business, maybe we just dont classify it as marketing.... , ..anyway not marketing we would go out and hire someone for...
.what we do with the info in our ads, facebook, flyers, tv, billboards etc etc is what i mean by marketing....
i spend tons of time and money on that kind of marketing ....im sure not against it..
.also our first years, when we grew so fast , we had no marketing except word of mouth and networking.... no signs, no ads, no tv, no billboards.... somehow it worked...

[vangogh]

Ann here's a definition I found on businessdictionary.com. I think it's pretty standard.

Marketing - The management process through which goods and services move from concept to the customer. As a practice, it consists in coordination of four elements called 4P's:

1. identification, selection, and development of a product
2. determination of its price
3. selection of a distribution channel to reach the customer's place, and
4. development and implementation of a promotional strategy.

I think your definition of marketing is mainly the 4th p, promotion. This full definition does support what you were saying earlier about the product being important. All 4 are really important, though I think you can have different levels of success based on how well you do with each. For example if you excel at promotion you might not need as good a product as another business who doesn't do promotion very well or the better price might beat the better product, etc.

Where Facebook is concerned it has a built in advantage by being what is essentially a product for communication. In general communication products are better when more people are using them. Take the telephone. If there was only one telephone in the world it would be useless. You need at least two of them for either to have any use. Still two telephones aren't all that useful. The more people have a telephone the more useful yours becomes. Once you own one it's in your best self-interest to spread the word and get others to buy a telephone too.

Same for Facebook. It's more useful when more people are using it. Again it's in Facebook members self-interest to tell their friends about it and get them to join since it makes the site more useful for that member. Taking it further say you've convinced a few friends to sign up for accounts, but those friends aren't using the site much. The more you communicate with them, the more likely they are to want to reply and use the site. Simply using the product helps spread the work and promotes the product.

[Patrysha]

Just because you do it yourself doesn't mean it's not marketing.

And just because you happen to be astute enough to recognize the signs of how to judge and apply to your next buying season...not all small business owners do. I had one client who was measuring traffic into her store...she openly claimed she had no idea what to do with such data but was recording it because she knew she had heard it was important somewhere or other. Part of my role as a marketing consultant is to help her see how to use those values to guide her marketing and measuring it's effect through the traffic and sales figures. This can help her see her closing rate and if she was recording return visitors and new customers along with general traffic...that this could further divide and guide her promotional efforts. Of course, she has to make it a priority to schedule that time or delegate the task or do nothing. All are valid options...depending on what her personal goals are.

Now just because one small business owner understands all this stuff whether by study or by instinct...doesn't mean they all have that benefit. And that's where people like me come in and help bridge the gap.

I personally don't believe any investment should be made in outside advertising should be made until every available free (and inexpensive) form of advertising is utilized and optimized first. (Can't seem to stomp out the Scottish side of me)

However, that doesn't mean there shouldn't be any outside investment for some people that mean brainstorming things like names, niches and taglines and it should mean investing in a decent logo and some basic business stationery (letterhead, invoices or receipts, business cards, possibly brochures, newsletters)...spending time learning how to write an ad well (if you don't already know how) or finding someone who has done the learning before you start paying for advertising is time (or money) well invested.

Not all of it or any of it is 100% necessary all of the time though, and that is where things get tricky. For every thing a person like me sets out as "essentials" there is probably some maverick type company out there that went a long way without whatever it is that is chosen for the list. A good name...there are poorly named products that have succeeded not as many as have failed to be sure...but just enough to make it arguable. And just as easily you can have something that has every step worked through inside out and backwards and something wild and unforseen makes it work out somehow differently than you imagined. That's just life...marketing is not immune to it...lol

[Spider]

Marketing has changed over the years. When I was at school, it was everything outside the factory gate. Inside the gate was Production, outside the gate was Marketing. That, in fact, is the first line of the definition that VG set out - "The management process through which goods and services move from concept to the customer."

That meant that shipping was part of marketing, and that is the third P - distribution channel to reach the customer's Place - but it didn't include development of the Product - the first P - because that was inside the gate and was properly part of production.

I guess these ideas are still there, but most people today use 'marketing' as almost synonymous with 'advertising and selling.'

[vangogh]

I think the idea of including the product as part of marketing is more recent. I wasn't sure when the concept of the 4Ps came into being so I did some quick searching and found this page on the marketing mix (http://www.netmba.com/marketing/mix/).

According to the article the marketing mix (with the 4Ps) was popularized by Neil H. Borden after his 1964 article "The Concept of the Marketing Mix" was published. However he'd been teaching the ideas since the late 1940s.

I think the idea for including product into the mix is in the decisions you make when developing the product, from finding a market to developing something for a specific market to choosing a name. If you think marketing before developing the product you have a better chance of developing something people actually want and are more likely to buy. Prior people would have come up with a product and then started thinking about who might buy and how could they sell it to them. This asks you to ask those questions before production in order to come up with something more likely to sell and also to avoid wasting time on a product you can determine isn't likely to succeed.

[greenoak]

I hear you patrysha, and i see how you could really help in all kinds of ways....there are so many new stores out there who really need good basics...and im sure you could tune up people more like me too.. tho probably not really about the style things i deal with.......im not against free but i sure dont have the time to do most of the guerilla marketing stuff., ... paying can be cheaper when you start counting your time...if i pay for something and it makes me money thats GOOD!!! if you count networking as free im all for that...
i thought you all would like my customer story with the big idea at the start of this thread......i will report back how it went if anyone is interested....why some make it and some dont is always kind of interesting to me........
in retail we usually call marketing vg"s 4th point....the promotion part...... thats how we use it in the field im in... ....maybe not in business school...
kind of like what the tv show madmen does ...getting your message out.... advertizing and selling...
i know there are a whole lot of marketing theories out there......and they usually sound very sure and authorative. you could probably make about any view and find an authorative marketing person to back it up..........there are tons of experts on the internet, who think they can deal with truckers one week and hairdressers the next..its probably the same in the seo field or in the interenet business advice field...anyway retail is bombarded with experts...
.thats why, if i were looking for help, i would choose someone DEEP into my field , like jon shallert or some of the expert marketers within the gift industry......they would be more like specialists for stores and know the trends and movements and colors and words and issues that make up my market....they would have the background already and i wouldnt have to come up with all that info before getting their job on the right path.... ...i would want a firm who knew what was so last year and what was hot for this year..
.same if i were looking for an seo pro i would look on here not on the dozens of emails and post i see from seo and web experts...

[Reflo Ltd]

Patrysha, I went to your site today and see that a lot of your pics are not displaying.

[jamesray50]

I wonder how much someone pays for a half hour infomercial in the middle of the night on a cable channel to sell something that no one really needs or wants. Do they sell very many of these products? They must or they wouldn't be able to afford the commercials. So who is their target audience? The insomniacs? People who buy everything they see? Certainly not a professional chef, or even a decent home cook because they would realize that chopper is a piece of junk.

[Patrysha]

Patrysha, I went to your site today and see that a lot of your pics are not displaying.

Thanks for visiting. Yeah, there are a few issues with my site at the moment but I've been unable to address them with the current schedule...but since I'm going to be rebranding soon anyway, I haven't really made a huge effort there.