Apprentice - What happened?

[Steve]

If you watched this week's Apprentice you would have seen two teams in NYC trying to promote a new Fusion razor from Gillette. They had to 'create a buzz' and get people to text message a certain phrase to a specific phone number. It seemed like a disaster. What did this act do for the company? So someone text messages something, how was this going to get more interested in them more interested in the product? Why didn't they go out and hand out free Fusion razors. Then if you wanted a set of free extra blades sent to you, you could just log into a website within a few days and fill out your address information. Maybe even have a tell a friend section where you could have a razor sent to a friend. What did you think of all this?

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[LawncareMarketingMagic]

Lawn care business tips

Excellent points TG, although this is typical advertising done by the 'big boys'. They have millions of dollars to throw around and they do it in a way that can't be tracked or held accountable. How will they ever know how many new razors they sold because of their effort to get people to text in?? It's a perfect example of what every small business should NOT do. However, as horrific as the entire exercise was, there's actually a pretty good lesson that could be learned from this episode. You see, even though the winning team had no real plan to attract attention, even though their message was lacking any creativity at all, they did one thing extremely well that propelled them to the win. The one thing they did better than the other team was they found a location where there would be lots of qualified prospects. They picked a spot where they knew there would be a large number of people standing around with nothing to do. Again, their message was extremely boring and had no creativity at all but they had a captive audience that had nothing better to do than text in while they waited. So how does this lesson translate to a lawn care business? One of the most important steps to being successful at marketing your business is finding a target market loaded with interested, qualified prospects. Find a market filled with people that are interested in your service and are qualified to buy, deliver a compelling sales message, and you'll have more business than you can handle. On the other hand, if you're delivering your message to people that aren't good targets for it, you'll end up looking like the obnoxious big guy that was dancing around like a fool trying to get people to notice him.

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Chestin

If I was Gillette I would honestly be upset at the idea that it would great a bad image for the company.

Some of the stuff on The Apprentice makes sense; such as the Sams Club thing the week before, but the whole idea of the text message with the razor I thought was kind of stupid.

Instead it would have been better to hand out sample bags of the razor and some shaving cream to promote the business. Then the potential customers will go home and use the razor.

Or even have it where a barber shop was setup, and you go in there for a shave with the razor. Then people could feel it right then and there.