'The Ten-Minute Marketer' hits home - new marketing book for restaurateurs and chain retailers

I often wonder if I really am a good writer. Good enough to entertain through this newsletter, certainly, as many or you have been kind enough to tell me. But good enough to write a book worth reading?

The goal of writing a worthwhile book, long presumed to be unattainable, will soon be fulfilled. And I strongly believe there is a need for the message it will carry.

What is that need? By some reports $65 billion was spent last year on sales promotion. Yet few companies, especially chain retailers and restaurants, received any real satisfaction from those vast expenditures. In fact, it is safe to say all they received were products sold at or near cost and a monumental case of indigestion.

The book's title: "The Ten-Minute Marketer."

The book's premise: that the ful chain retailers and restaurateurs of the |90s will reduce dramatically the large sums of money they now invest in coupons and gimmicky "sales promotions."

Instead, the chains will spend less money to make more. That is, they will go back to the neighborhoods - e.g., their 10-minute radius - through their store managers to develop relationships with potential customers who count.

It is becoming painfully apparent that mass media couponing no longer builds the kind of trial retailers need. Instead, they've now become so commonplace that they simply feed that portion of the consuming public known to those in the supermarket trade as discount "cherry pickers." Instead of being led into the stores by loss leaders, then spending much more, the "cherry pickers" go from place to place to pick up only the loss leaders.

The Ten-Minute Marketer advocates the idea that we soon swing the marketing pendulum all the way back from the big dollar coupons and mass media to the times when our restaurateur - our, clothing store manager, our banker, our auto repair store manager - knew us by name. Imagine your grocer using your name to say hello to you.

Back to the future, as it were.

How can this be done, especially when stores and neighborhoods have become so big? Computers and databases are a big part of the answer to that but only part. You see, I'm learning, as are many people, that technology doesn't drive computers; people do.

In a phrase you can't "dialogue market" with a computer. You do it with well-trained people who have effective and efficient computer support.

High tech and high touch, the ultimate combination.

Why "Ten-Minute" (marketer)? Both research and common sense tell us that 80 percent to 90 percent of most chains' revenues come from customers who live, work, shop or visit within 10 minutes of their respective stores. Minutes, not miles, universally govern the distinctions between, say, a downtown Seattle store from one located in Boca Raton.

Secondly, we believe that if you give a store manager the right rules and tools and the ongoing support of helpful people managing their computer database, a manager can do all the marketing he or she needs to do in 10 minutes each day. That means less than one hour per week instead of the well-intentioned but often misguided local store marketing programs they currently are using.

I'm referring to such programs as: "Join your Rotary or Kiwanas and you'll sell a lot more hamburgers."

Wrong. Join these service clubs, and you'll do a good thing for your community. But if you're joining to sell something, better get ready to be away from your store two hours - at high noon! - a week for 52 weeks a year. That's a heck of a high price to pay for something that, quite frankly, you have no way of knowing what was returned to you in sales.

And one of our Canadian managers explained exquisitely: "I paid $600 for my nearby kids' hockey team sweaters, but I went to their first game, met all the parents and gave out a few coupons and now I can count 40 new customers from the one hour I spent at that game!"

You see, were finding, and I'll be writing, that owing to the continually increasing saturation of competitors, a lot of old chain marketing adages are going out of style. I'm going to poke holes in such comments as:

"Operators operate and marketers market."

"Television and radio are the cure for all that ails your sales."

"Local store marketing's best use is as a training ground for our younger and lower-paid marketing personnel."

"Direct mail is good, but it's too expensive."

This how-to book will be made interesting by case histories of our four years of building our - and our clients' - business by becoming . "Ten-Minute Marketers." We also will sprinkle the types of quotations and personal banter you've become accustomed to in this newsletter. In fact, some will be "lifts." We plan to use a non-textbook style, based on what we've learned from our years of trial and error.

Am I selling you a book through this article? No, it won't even be in print for six to nine months. In fact, I just thought you'd enjoy the thinking behind it.

COPYRIGHT 1992 Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group