Go Elf Yourself
By Jimmy Vee
One of the ways to increase your Gravitational Potential and attract the kind of high quality customers who pay more, stay longer and refer everyone they know is to Be Sensational.
In our book, we talk about how you can Be Sensational and one of the ways that always gives entrepreneurs, business owners and sales people the most trouble is the seventh “Be,” which is Be Spread-able.
When your prospects have a thousand other options, being Sensational is the reason they choose you. It’s the reason they Gravitate to you. You have to have a Sensational marketing story so you can Captivate your prospects. You have to be Sensational so they get Invigorated by your offer. And finally you have to be Sensational so they are Motivated to do business with you and refer their friends and family.
Being Sperad-able is just one element you need to work on to become Sensational. This is a tough one. This is also the one we have the most trouble explaining. But here is a great example of being Spread-able…
OfficeMax, which is a company that I’m not very fond of because I have had horrible customer service experiences with them in my local store (Travis and I have almost been literally thrown out of our OfficeMax store on a few different occasions), has come up with a great spread-able promotional campaign for the holidays.
Check out www.elfyourself.com.
On the site you can upload your picture and the pictures of three of your friends, and then call a special phone number where you can leave a personal holiday message. Their interactive system takes your photos and voice message and creates a flash video of you and your friends as elves dancing to Christmas music with you delivering your special holiday message.
It’s a blast and millions of these messages have been flying around the internet for the holidays and driving people back to OfficeMax. I’m not sure if they are cross promoting this in their store and in their offline media but if they aren’t they are missing out big time. This is the kind of thing that gets people talking and interacting with you.
The one thing they don’t do is require your email address. This is a big mistake. If they did, they could send holiday promotional messages and in-store coupons to everyone who opted in. I would have also made the elves in the video interact with office supplies so there is more of a product tie in.
