SETH GODIN and the PURPLE COW
Seth Godin, a well known marketing guru of the 20st century, is talking about his theory on marketing in this talk. I’ve read “Unleashing the Ideavirus” and “Purple Cow”, both by Seth, and they’ve been very useful! I cannot recommend enough that you read, books by Seth, especially “Purple Cow”, it’s a wonderful piece of art! 
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In this talk, he summarizes the idea of “Purple Cow”, and you should probably get the point. Be remarkable!
If you want to know more about Seth? You can visit his website or his quite interesting blog.
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The Market Thoughts… [#3]
In this third part of “The Market Thoughts”, I want to throw light on the effect of giving your product away for free. At the market where me and my family sold fruit and vagetables, we let people taste our goods.
My two Uncles and I shouted day and night: “Free tastes!…Your welcome to try our cherries, grapes and peas!” , by that people came to our booth and tried out some of the fruits.
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More than 80% of those who got a free taste (of fresh’n'lovely fruit, who will not buy that?) bought something. I’d, before the market, heard that it should increase your sales to give away your product for free, but I was amazed of the effect of it! If we hadn’t let people taste our products, and if we hadn’t yelled day and night about our sweet offer, those hungry customers would never had bought anything…
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Point is? Let people taste, try and use your product before they buy it. Some will refuse it (of cause), but the outcome of such a free offer is huge! Not only do you increase your sales, but people will start talking about your product! Everybody wants something that’s free, and when they’ve discovered how sweet your product is, they’ll probably buy it! 
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(Of cause it depends of which kind your product is, CAN you give it away? CAN people taste/try it? can YOU affort to give it away?)
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This is a well-known marketing-method. One of those who talks about it now and then is Seth Godin, a world famous marketer. If you don’t know Seth Godin, you’re out! 
He has written a couple of great and inspiring books, definitely worth reading!
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5 Things You Should Avoid
About webdesign!
As a webdesigner my motivation to live, is the vision of making the web a more beautiful place to surf. I’ve spend thousands of hours surfing around the web looking at great designs, smart navigation, and beautiful colour compositions. I’ve come up with 5 things you, as a webdesigner, should avoid in the build up of a standard website! They are listed below, and they’re all based on my own experiences.
- Intro
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Don’t use a startpage/beforepage for your website, it’s useless.
Which function does it include? If it lets people choose if they want to see the HTML-version or the FLASH-version of your site, pack your stuff and start all over again. YOU choose whether your site is HTML or FLASH, not the visitor! Period.
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- Navigation
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Don’t try to come up with some revolutionary idea of how a website-navigation should look like. Place the navigation right in the middle, top, to the left or the right side.
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Furthermore, don’t use dropdown-menus - they are waste of time, and people are tired of them.
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By following this advice you utilize peoples navigation-habits, and your site appears more user-friendly (at least according to the navigation)
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Two examples of bad bad navigation:
The National Association for Child Development
Brown University
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If you really wanna explore the world of usability, you should probably read something by, the world famous (and Danish by the way ) usability-expert, Jakob Nielsen. - Colors
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Don’t build extremely colorful websites. Choose one colorscheme of about 3-5 main colors. By that you increase the chance of building a clean and stylish website that’s worth looking at
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There are tons of great colorschemes out there, I normally use Colorschemer or Colourlovers as useful and inspiring sources.
.The colorscheme for this site:
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NB: If you are afraid of your site getting boring because of a small amounts of (main) colors? Insert pictures and photographs, a picture says more than a thousands words…use that! - Crossbrowsing
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Don’t make your website look sweet’n'nice in one browser (e.g. Firefox) while you let it suck in another (IE).
Make your website look the same in all browsers, all people should be able to experience your site and have the same outcome of it. You should test your website in at least Internet Explore and Mozilla Firefox (More info on browser-usage here).
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- (White)space & Proportions
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Don’t ever think that you’re not allowed to use space, EVER! I think this is one of the most important things when you design a website. Use WHITESPACE and PROPORTIONS.
It is so important to give the visitor a great experience when he or she visits your site, you can do that if you increase the amount of space (especially whitespace, if it fits your colorscheme of cause) between borders, text, tables, pictures whatever!
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If you keep this in mind when designing, your site will not end up as a mess of fonts, pictures, colors etc. (e.g. like this site)
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Good Bad
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That was a few tips and tricks, I hope you guys find them useful. If you want to see more of this, I’ve found a few lists which could be useful, cheers!
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Netmag.co.uk - 20 PRO TIPS
Graphic-design.com - The TOP20 Web Design Tips
Fadtastic - 25 Ways To Improve Your Site Today
Jakob Nielsen - Top ten mistakes in webdesign
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Webware TOP100 2007
Do you know what OpenID, ScrubIT, LeapTag, Eyejot or Whisher is? No?..
Well, then check out the Webware TOP100! The results of all the votes will be released on the 18th of June, but still, there are a lot of great web2.0 concepts out there that I’d never dreamed of, and a lot of them are togethered @ Webware. Really worth visiting! You’ll probably find better alternatives to some of the web2.0 concepts that you already use…
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The Market Thoughts… [#2]
As a continuation on last “The Market Thoughts…[#1]“, I realized another thing at “The Market”.
As I was standing there, selling fruit, I got asked hundreds of times where the fruit came from. When I told the customer that the tomatoes were from the Netherlands, the/she always said something like: “From the Netherlands? Well I don’t want tomatoes then…they use poison…” - Okay? How could they be so sure of that just because it’s legal in the Netherlands, in some areas, to use poison?
People do always have prejudices about something! Maybe they’ve heard a rumour, read an article, heard something from a friend, which creates an unsubstantiated opinion about something (or anything).
So? Does your product in some way relate or associate, with some kind of common prejudice or rumour? If so, you might need to brand and market your product in a different way.
Instead of selling tomatoes from the Netherlands, I could have chosen to sell tomatoes from Denmark. That’s a question of price and research.
SUM: It is a good idea to test your product in your target audience, and by that a good idea to know your target audience, before you take off! Remember that…research, research, research…
Emails You Have To Answer
From time to time I have a lot of traffic in my inbox. The projects I’m involved in require, now and then, a lot of mails to be sent and organized. I have several times experienced that people (whether they have an important status or not) don’t answer emails. I don’t know if it’s because of the email itself? Can it really be of such a value that it’s not worth answering? Honestly, I don’t think so…
I think it’s sad that some people waste the opputinity to e.g. corporate, before they even know what they refuse…anyway it’s just a thought, and in some way I understand people who simply don’t have the time to answer emails, but couldn’t you get a secretary?
Well, my point is that you have to answer every single email (written by a human being)!…the sender will be pleased to get an answer, even if it’s negative! By that he/she can move on instead of wasting valuable time on you.
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The Market Thoughts… [#1]
Time has passed and I haven’t had the time for a post before now. Sorry for that…
Anyway, last weekend I went to one of Denmarks biggest markets. It’s a family tradition that we, every year, travel to this market and sell fruits and vegatables. Actually it was our 20th anniversary this year, hell yeah! It’s fun because it isn’t something I do every day Variation is good!
When we had set up the booth and were ready for the fruits to be sold, I tried to get a whole picture of the booth and discovered that some of the melons looked rather not attractive because of the packaging (Picture #1). I asked “the boss” (My grandfather, 63) if we should unwrap them, to which he answered: “No, the trick is to sell packages of 3″…ye? but couldn’t we do that if the melons were unwrapped?
I unwrapped the melons without his permission and made them look more attractive than before (at least in my opinion ;)) (Picture #2).
Pitcure #1 Picture #2
So…what do I want to point out? I want to make you think of how your product is seen by other people. Is it “wrapped” in something that makes it look more unattractive than if it wasn’t wrapped? (so to speak). What can you do to make your product look more attractive? Think about the possibilities you have according to the presentation of your product. In many cases it’s not that complicated I think…
Idea-validation
This method I’m going to explain is great to use after a brainstorming-session. If you have about 50 ideas/suggestions on how to solve a problem, you’ll probably only need one. Therefore you need to find the best and most expedient!
If you’ve found 10 of 50 ideas which you think are usable, you should put each one of these into this table below and thereby find their value, and maybe your solution.
The x-axis represents criteria, and the y-axis represents points in each criterion. The idea which get most points is probably (notice, probably) the one you should go for.
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Criteria could for instance be:
- Do we/I have enough resources to realize the idea/product?
- Do we/I have the sufficient amount of competences to form the product?
- Is the idea/product realistic?
- How much money will the idea/product cost us/me, can we/I afford that?
There are a lot of these methods out there, but I’ve found this one useful. This is not to suggest that you follow this method strictly, I think you should use it as a helper to reach your goal. Happy brainstorming
That Specific Name…Why?
Me and a mate have had our newly started firm (Luciti, website) for a couple of months now. We run it as a hobby at the moment, because of the exams that we both enter these days…I’m hopefully graduated at June the 28th, no big deal
Anyway, we’ve had a lot of trouble conercning the name. We don’t think “Luciti” associates with the right things. Therefore we’ve several times tried to come up the a new innovative name, but domains are taken, god dammit! I hate it…
We’ve thought about the meaning of our firm’s name, and we’ve concluded that the name doesn’t matter, when we aren’t bigger than we are. The attention our customers pay to the name is slight.
If we (hopefully) grow big some day, we’ll be able to change the name before this happens. The most important thing (As Guy Kawasaki points out in “The Art of The Start“) is to get started. Start doing something, don’t get stuck by the name, come up with some random name, it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it isn’t something ridiculous. Go get started!
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If you really want to find a perfect name from the beginning, I can only recommend this guide. Michael McDerment shares several strategies and tips on how to come up with a name for your business or whatever. Happy naming!
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Do you need inspiration? Let StumbleUpon help you!
Do you know StumbleUpon? I bet some of you do, but for those who don’t, please keep reading, you’ll be blessed at the end of this post.
You know, when you need inspiration or entertainment, where do you look? YouTube, Myspace, URLs you got from friends? I don’t know, but when I have to come up with a new idea or find inspiration, I (now and then) use StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a tool which shows you (mostly) great and useful sites, in categories that you have chosen on a configuration-page.
Me for an example, I’ve chosen to see sites in the genre of “Graphic design”. When I click the “Stumble”-button in my toolbar, I get a site (that I’ve probably not seen before) about graphic design (e.g. this site). It is as simple as that. There are (probably..) hundreds of categories, which you can choose to get sites from. Your passion or interest should be there
The sites that you get are sites which have been recommended by other StumbleUpon-users. This means that you also can recommend sites, and thereby expand the directory of cool websites!
Simple but fantastic!
You can find more information on how to use StumbleUpon, and what else the concept offers at the website.
Check it out! StumbleUpon
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