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A Survey, a Free Offer, and an Interview

by Neil Raphel

This month's Raphel Report features a survey, a free offer for you, and some thoughts about changing the Rules of the Game.

First, the survey. We're writing a book about online couponing that we plan to publish this summer. We're fascinated with the rise of companies such as Groupon and Living Social that offer groups of people discounts on services and products, including travel, spas, and restaurant offers. The  deals are heavily discounted from retail price, and are often distributed by people to their friends and colleagues. It's a different and interesting way for merchants to reach out to new customers.

You can help us with our research for our book by filling out the survey which is located here. If you put your email address in the appropriate survey question, we will send you a summary of our survey results. The survey should take less than three minutes, and we'd appreciate your help.

Now, the free offer. A New Zealand marketing professional named Graham McGregor has put together interviews with 25 top sales and marketing experts from five countries. He calls this collection the "Unfair Business Advantage Report." The report is a valuable marketing resource and is available to you at no cost! To receive your complimentary copy of Graham's report please click here.

Graham interviewed me for his report. My topic was how businesses can gain an "unfair business advantage" by changing the Rules of the Game. A portion of the interview follows:

Neil, what‘s your favourite sales or marketing strategy that‘s working really well for you and your clients to give you an unfair business advantage?

Neil Raphel: Well Graham, sometimes when you are competing in business and your are not doing very well it‘s better to change the rules of the game and I can give you a few examples of how that works.

One that comes to mind is Flip camera. I don‘t know if you have them over there.

Graham: We do, I am familiar with them and they seem to work really well.

Neil: Flip came along about ten years ago when all the video cameras were adding extra features, increasing the size of the image they were taking and more. And Flip said, Why don‘t we make a worse camera? Not a better camera but a worse camera.

Let‘s take out some of the features that we don‘t need. Let‘s make it really small and let‘s make the video quality a little worse. But what they did in turn was they changed the playing field. They made a cheaper camera, a smaller camera, a camera you could just plug and play into your computer right away and they were a remarkable success story because that‘s what people wanted. They really didn‘t want more features, the products were too cumbersome and too hard to use. The Flip was very easy to use. It worked extremely well for the types of videos that most people take.

Graham: In terms of changing the playing field I assume there are a lot of different ways that any business could change the playing field. For example I read about an interesting dentist in Los Angeles many years ago. He was called the vampire dentist because he decided to only operate between something like 4 p.m. and 4 a.m. He reasoned that there were a lot of people working in places like Hollywood film studios that wouldn‘t have the time to go and see a dentist in normal business hours so perhaps after hours would suit these people better.

Neil: That‘s a great example. There‘s a similar, medical example that we are very familiar with. A doctor decided he‘s now going to make house calls. Nobody makes house calls these days. He‘s going to make house calls and he‘s going to do it through the internet. Using Skype he puts himself in your house to talk to you and treat you.

And he doesn‘t take insurance. He said insurance is different than paying for medical care. Insurance should cover the big emergencies that you may have, a huge operation or cancer, but for your ordinary stuff, just pay me. He is very successful and it‘s a paradigm for other doctors.

That's it for this month. Hope you enjoy Graham's report and thanks in advance for taking our survey.