Don't just satisfy

Customer satisfaction is such an overrated statement.  We all know that when a customer buys your product or hires your service, he/she either needs it or wants it and is already satisfied.  But what's often done is failing to excite them.

A taxi driver should not assume that their passenger knows the route.  He travels the road every minute every day and therefore should know the best route to a less congested traffic.  The passenger is already satisfied with taking the cab.  But the driver could induce excitement by simply asking which route he/she prefers to take.  How simple could that be?  And it only takes a few seconds to deliver and it doesn't cost him anything.

A government employee could excite a citizen by giving accurate procedures.  The government can make a citizen even happier if it can reduce if not simplify the required documents to process. There is better and positive result if the government charges fees one-time on the same amount than charging on a per-document basis.  This doesn't cost anything at all.  What it needs is just to espouse trust.

A band can excite their fans by going to their table and talk with them after their gig.  Their fans are already satisfied with the performance.  But good conversations are priceless and can build more fans via word-of-mouth (fans would tell their friends that you sat beside them over beer).  This doesn't cost the band at all.

So don't just satisfy.  Learn to excite so they will talk more about you.  It goes a long a way.

Opium's infinity and beyond

I used to think that marketing is about making sales. Actually it isn't.

I thought marketing is about making people think and then talk about what other people are talking about because somebody in this planet came up with something worth talking and spreading.

In most marketing plans, ideas only extend to a shelf life of say 5 to maybe 20 years. If a brand or product is good and was envisioned to improve people's lives in a lifetime, that lifetime may actually be about 100 years max or so. In between those years would be innovations of the same brand or product.

A song's pop life could last for 2 years. Then it gets revived years after to maybe another 5 years after that. Then after that, who knows?

Opium magazine came up with this Infinity tribute issue last May.

Questions in my head...

Who will be there to discover what's beneath the ink layered cover page? Who will decipher the codes? Whether it's a brilliant idea or otherwise is not the point. Whether the editor's claim is accurate or not, it definitely made people talk about it in this lifetime.

... and perhaps for 10 centuries to come.

And hey guess what? You're probably talking about this already.

Music marketing is "niche"

New business ideas can be scary and the marketing option these types would most likely land in is niche marketing. One good friend recently said that new ideas cannot sell. I beg to disagree.

New ideas sell if you are creative enough to find its market. It's not about how smart you are really. It's about how daring you are to succeed (or even fail).

Entrepreneurs are creative people (not always in the artistic sense) who can transform garbage into a treasure to an initial few. This creative ability can be applied to music.

If you are a musician in a rock 'n' roll band, stay close in working with the first 10 fans you have and keep them happy. Each of these 10 will soon give you another 10 and all of a sudden you get 100 fans in a day and then another 1000 the next day.

The next thing you know, that treasure becomes a trend.

Did I mention that I'm a sucker for wise quotes? While browsing webpages matching up an industry for a business I'm putting up, I found this - creativity leads to niches, and niches lead to riches.

Of course it doesn't always happen that way but the point is that small business ideas require community building. Hence it needs a niche. Music is communal. Its entrepreneurial platform shouldn't be any different. Music marketing is niche marketing.