Visualize animals grazing in the leafy plains of Africa; the Zebra is easy to see because of its stripes and amongst so many magnificent animals the Zebra still manages to stand out.

Now, I'm not suggesting the Zebra planned it this way! I'm just noting it happens. Amongst the Elephants and Lions the Zebra still manages to stand out.

I began to think about this phenomenon. I drew an analogy between the Zebra and the magnificent herd of African animals and the myriad of businesses we find in every city of the world. I certainly found major companies (the Elephants and Lions) standing out by spending millions of dollars out of the massive advertising budgets. They employed super stars like Michael Jackson and Ray Charles to help them.

However, I also found small businesses, with little or no budgets that managed to stand out from the herd too. I observed how they did it and decided this was for me. Today, I follow this format in everything I do.

Hence my Zebra Marketing Principle states "If you take time to think about standing out from the herd, you can achieve low budget and often no budget marketing." In our small businesses (defined as any business with a turnover of less than $10,000,000 per year) we simply do not have those huge budgets to play with, we have to do it smarter.

The good news is it is possible. I'm not saying it's easy...but it is possible. I want to share ideas I use. I want to share ideas from around the world that fit into this low budget and no budget format.

The key, I've found, is taking time to think; taking time to observe; taking time to research.

You might start by observing how your competitors advertise. One of the businesses we operate is a hospitality brokerage business. We sell hotels, motels, and liquor stores. Like our competitors we advertised in the Yellow Page telephone book that focused on advertising businesses.

Like our competitors we used about a third of the advertisement trying to implant our company name, Hitchins Marketing, in the minds of potential customers. It was expensive and not very effective. Each year we could only trace about ten contacts back to this form of advertising.

However, we were assured all businesses ‘had' to be in the Yellow Pages. The Yellow Page salespeople assured us to get better results we really needed to double the size of our advertisement and add color to it. Doing this would treble our advertising expenditure.

Does this sound familiar? However we figured we would do something different to our competitors. We changed the focus of our advertisement from ourselves to the potential customer.

Our advertisement now reads: 10 Secrets You Must Know Before Buying a Hotel, Motel or Liquor Store. Call us for your free copy. We relegated Hitchins Marketing to a much smaller space in the advertisement. Whilst the change may have hurt our ego last year we sent out in excess of 200 copies of ‘10 Secrets!'

Can you use this idea with your Restaurant. Think about it. Perhaps you can offer: 10 Secret Recipes for home entertainment; 10 Secrets to cut you home food cost; 10 Secrets to save on electricity. Perhaps you can offer these to your customers and potential customers.

Max Hitchins - Varanu Pty Ltd
PO Box 5250, Greenwich NSW 2065 AUSTRALIA
Tel: 0419 53 63 73     Fax: 02 9427 9050
Intl: +61 419 53 63 73     Fax: +61 2 9427 9050
E-mail: max@hitchins.com.au 

www.HospitalityDoctor.com