What's New or What's Working?

Many is the time when I go to see an existing client or a new client and after the coffee and catch up I usually get, “So Fred, in your travels around the country, have you seen anything new? 

Sure, New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, ha, ha!  Mildly amused I still get, “no seriously, anything new?”  

Now, while it’s perfectly natural to ask the question about “what’s new?” (After all, we all want to be on the leading edge of technology and have the latest mouse trap and bait for our customers) we keep looking further and further out for "what's new? and we tend to forget about our existing products and their hunger for communication" 

I always wish that the question was rather: “anything out there that’s working great.” It just seems that what “works” is a lot more important question than “what is new.”

Back in early February,  I started working on a client’s late night weekday bowling product as well as tweaking his weekend family package to add more value to it. 

He had these programs in place and was struggling to keep up with his emailing, faceboooking, SEO, SEM and SMO marketing when I finally said;  “Whoa you’re spending so much time working on the newest technology that you’re forgetting about communicating your existing products!

His head snapped around and he said, “Damn, you’re right, what do we do?”  

About a day or two later I got back to him with a multi media plan that included a series of direct mails, emails, couponing and sweepstakes offers as well as some very targeted “freemiums” to major corporations and businesses in the area.

“But, but”, he sputtered, that’s not NEW!!  "You are right, 100% right,"  I answered, but it WORKS. 

After an hour of this, he finally agreed to go ahead with it.  The results and I’m not trying to brag here, but we moved his average monthly open play from $35,000 to $51,000.

If there was anything new at all, it was in the creative presentation of the delivery of the offer, backed by a guarantee and a sweepstakes for an I pad (which generated lots of new emails  and about a dozen summer league sign ups  too).  It was cool.

So the next time you are looking for “what’s new”; maybe you should rephrase the question into “what’s working?”