Category Archives: Original Content

A Divorcee, a Dentist and a Marketing Wonk Walk Into a Bar*

Don’t you just love stock images?

True story: One man marries and divorces 6 wives in 10 years.

True story: A woman tells 7 different dentists over 5 years that none of them know how to make good dentures.

True story: A business owner hires 5 marketing consultants in 7 years, yet the business continues to decline.

Question: What do the man, the woman, and the business owner have in common?

Are they unlucky in love, periodontal disease and commerce?

Or, are they willingly unwilling to find success?

The man in the first story is a terrible husband.

The woman in the second story is a lousy patient.

The business owner in the third story….well, you get the picure.

Moral: As you navigate the stormy waters of life, spend some time in self-examination. Failure isn’t a bad thing, as long as you can learn from it and apply what you’ve learned in the future.

The Flip Side

Question: What do the 6 wives, 7 dentists and 5 marketing consultants have in common?

Each of them likely ignored many warning signs that they were about to be engaged by an asshole.

Moral: As you strive for love and success, find a way to steer clear of people who refuse to be happy. This often involves trusting your gut feelings as well as your closest advisors. Sometimes that’s hard to do.

*In Ad-Writing 101 we learn that the purpose of the headline is to get you to read the next line. Did it work?

Relief for Cement Burn: Why I Still Live in a Small Town

Half the time, I hide the fact that I still live in the town I grew up in. Mostly, to save conversation time for more important things. (Yes, it takes me almost 3 hours to get to the airport…no, we have no Starbucks…yes, Cabela's is headquartered here…that's why you've heard of Sidney – with an "i" – not the one in Australia.)

Sometimes when someone asks where I live, I'll simply respond, "Sidney" and leave off the Nebraska part. It makes me instantly more interesting. 😉

What about Cement Burn?" you ask. I'm getting to it.

Last week, while working on what my dad used to call an "over-do-it-yourself" project, I made the amateur mistake of applying a showerful of grout with the assistance of my bare hands. Doh!

Portland cement (the active ingredient in grout) burns you with a strong alkaline pH level. You won't notice the burn until it's too late. By supper time, my hands were red. By bed time, I had about 5 sores that were burning like a soldering iron was resting gently on the surface of my skin. (20 years in radio taught me what that feels like too.) I didn't sleep much that night. In fact I spent the night Googling for remedies for this particular brand of stupidity.

Next morning, I decided to cash in all my life-lines in an effort to find relief for my hands. I texted my sister, the doctor. Waited a few minutes. No response back. I went over to my neighborhood Safeway in search of some kind of "emulsifying" lotion that was recommended on a web site. I asked the pharmacist there about it. He recommended finding some Johnson and Johnson First Aid Cream, which Safeway no longer carried. He suggested that one of the local pharmacies might have some.

I drove over to my pharmacy, Western Drug. I didn't go there first because Safeway was more convenient, at 4 blocks away. You see, Western Drug is clean across town from here…almost 15 blocks, with 2 stop signs and 2 traffic lights between here and there. You city-dwellers laugh, go ahead.

Photo I walked in and started looking for "First Aid Cream." Tom Birner (the pharmacist who owns the place) asked me what I needed and then told me that Johnson and Johnson had discontinued the stuff years ago. He asked what the problem is and I told him. "Wait right here," he said as he disappeared into the back.

He returned carrying this medicine bottle with a hand-written label that simply said, "Western Lotion."

"We've got a lot of construction workers that swear by this stuff. We've been making it in batches for as long as I can remember. It's got a lot of ingredients…antiseptic plus witch-hazel plus (a bunch of other stuff that I can't remember) and it's in a glycerin base. Just keep it on your hands and you'll be fine."

He didn't charge me because he only had half a bottle on hand and someone in the office had used a bit. I'd have gladly paid anything for relief. 

Sounds like snake oil, eh? Well, it worked! My hands were still raw, but feeling much better. I applied that stuff 6 or 8 times that day, a few times overnight and I was on the road to recovery.

Western Drug has been in Sidney for about 120 years. In the early part of the 20th century they even operated out of a tent in the middle of the street while a new building was built. Joel Birner, Tom's dad, bought the place in the mid-1960s. He was our pharmacist when I was a kid and he was a good friend and client of my dad's radio stations. I don't know if the Western Lotion recipe pre-dates Joel or not.

Bottom line is you'll never find this stuff or anything like it at your Walgreens, Wal-Mart, or other corpo-box store. But, in my little town, the local pharmacy still cares, still has the recipe and is carrying on in the shadow of the giants…even though they are way across town.

P.S. My sister finally called. When I told her about the lotion, she wanted to get the recipe because she's had patients who could use it. She practices in an even smaller town, way up north in the Sandhills.

P.P.S. Right now, Western Drug doesn't have a web site. If you want some of this stuff, drop me a line and I'll see what I can do.

Prosound: On-Hold Messaging for Smart Business Owners

We launched a new client web site last week for ProsoundUSA.com, a company that specializes in improving the phone experience of your customers. Instead of just providing "on-hold messages" and those automated attendant systems that we've all come to hate, ProsoundUSA owner Chester Hull makes it his business to learn about yours BEFORE attempting to tell you what your message should be.

Chester-HullIn fact, he takes it one step further and will evaluate how your living, breathing, real-life staff is doing on the phones. His phone evaluation service costs just $149 and if it saves just one sale, would be worth it to most businesses. Followups include not only his message writing and production, but customized phone etiquette training for your staff.

I don't normally gush like this about clients, but Chester is a kindred soul to those of us who believe that building a brand is more than just a cool logo and a funny ad. Chester knows that a brand is built only at that place where the customer's world intersects with the business's world. The phones are often the very first point of contact.

If delivering an outstanding experience to your callers is important to your business, Prosound is your first stop. Take a listen to his on-hold message samples and you'll understand how he's different. And, be sure to subscribe to Chester's on-hold marketing blog, he's got a lot to say about your phones.

About the web site…

Chester hired Wizard of Ads Partner Paul Boomer and I to re-design his old site from the ground up using our Persona-based approach. As Chester will tell you, the effort of putting up a site using this methodology is about 80% under water.

That is, we spent a great deal of time getting to understand Prosound's customers and their motivations…what points of information are important to them and in what order. Only after we understood his business, could we begin to map out pages, sketch out designs and get to the point where most web developers begin their process.

Kinda sounds like the same approach Chester takes, huh?

Here's the "after" shot of Chester's site:

Prosound-After 

And…here's what it looked like before:

Prosound-Before

Ok…let's roll the credits: