January | 2010 | ADwërks: Blog

Your accountant will be happy to know that there is a mathematical formula to sales and marketing.Prospects
X    Closing Ratio
X    Average ticket
=         $$$ Sales

Advertising recently worked on me and I became a prospect for a Martinizing Dry Cleaning location on our side of town.

I’m not a coupon clipper, but for some reason I was paging through a Shopping News coupon book and spotted an ad with coupons for Martinizing. Even though I’ve driven buy their location many times on the way to the soccer fields, I had never noticed the location on our side of town over by The Keg Chicken.

Having some extra cleaning to do, I thought I’d give them a try and save the 20% that the coupon offered all at the same time. The coupon was not good on same day service, which I did notice in the ad.

It was a later lunch and I arrived with cleaning in one hand, the coupon in the other, and cash in my wallet at about 1:30. It was Thursday and I wanted the cleaning on Saturday…two days on my Outlook Calendar and the one on the wall in the Kitchen.

That’s when I learned that the dry cleaning day doesn’t match the business day. At 1:30, the day’s work had been completed, so I was actually living on Friday time at the cleaners. Since it was Friday on a Thursday, the cleaning I wanted on a Saturday was only one day away making the offer null and void.

Not appreciating advertising that seemed misleading, I gathered up the sport coats and apologized to the young lady at the counter that I would have to take it somewhere else.

I was a prospect, but she didn’t close the deal. And it wasn’t just the $30.00 or $40.00 that walked down the street…there’s another zero involved when you look at the amount of business that could have been garnered from the next twelve months of business, most of which would have been at full price without a coupon. (And that amount multiplies with the referral factor of a happy customer.) The Average Ticket in this case is much more than the 30-bucks worth of cleaning that was lying on the counter.

So what’s the lesson? If you pay for advertising, want it to bring in new customers, want to use your investment to put a hurt on the competitors, and someone is ready to “pay me my money down”, please close the deal.

In this case, a simple education of a new customer about the store’s deadlines and cleaning schedules, along with a cheerful, “let me take care of it this time for you” would have gone a long way toward making the sale and building the business.

They did however prevent an unauthorized discount from occurring west of I-29. I guess that’s what happens when it’s Friday on a Thursday. And if Friday comes on a Thursday, do I get to start the weekend early?

- Leigh Anglin

I know this blog post is slightly off topic. It’s not really about advertising, but really about communication in general, so bear with me.

Welcome to 2010. That’s twenty ten, not two-thousand ten or two-thousand and ten. And please, don’t say “oh-ten.” I heard that the other day and I cringed.

My reason for saying twenty-ten is simple. For the last millennium we have said it that way. The last century was the “nineteens” and what comes after nineteen? Twenty.

History is filled with examples of the correct pronunciation. With the Magna Carta, King John was required to give rights to men. That was in Twelve Fifteen. In grade school we all learned the rhyme “in Fourteen Ninety-Two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Our country courageously declared our independence from England in Seventeen Seventy-six, not One Thousand Seven Hundred and Seventy-six. And back in the eighties, Prince helped us party like it was Nineteen Ninety-Nine.

A few brave and respected journalists have been using this method from Twenty Oh One right through Twenty Oh Nine. Venerable radio broadcaster and host of Sunday Morning on CBS, Charles Osgood has lead the charge. When all around him people were stumbling over “two-thousand and something”, he stuck to his guns.

And Charles and I are not alone. The National Association of Good Grammar has our back. “NAGG has decided to step in and decree that (2010) should officially be pronounced ‘twenty ten,’ and all subsequent years should be pronounced as ‘twenty eleven,’ ‘twenty twelve,’ etc.,”

But the decision to say the years this way is not a new one. Back in 1969 (that’s nineteen sixty-nine, for those of you playing along at home) a couple of one-hit wonders from Lincoln, Nebraska had us (or at least our moms and dads) singing “In the Year 2525”. And Zagar & Evans would never had a number 1 hit if they’d been singing “In the year twenty-five thousand and twenty-five.

And this morning, the first one of twenty-ten, I watched the anchors on The Today Show struggle with the verbiage. Most of the time they got it right, a few times they corrected themselves part way through, but when Al Rokerslipped up and said “two-thousand and ten” he got a stern look from one of the other hosts.

And if you’re the kind who can turn his back on logic and reason, can I appeal to your lazy side? Twenty ten is shorter and easier to say. Three syllables instead of five. If you’re the “go green save the earth” type, saying twenty ten takes less energy and by say it, your body produces less carbon monoxide than saying two-thousand and ten. Twenty ten can reduce your carbon footprint!

Every year at this time, we struggle to write the correct year. So I’m throwing out a new challenge, as you forge ahead into the new year, try to stick to twenty ten. Who’s with me?

- Jim Mathis

Monthly Archives: January 2010

Marketing 101…Keep the money in the building.

Welcome to Twenty Ten!