The Good News
Never before has it been easier for young entrepreneurs to compete with the big boys. The first thing that attracts investors, media and corporate sponsorship is the fearless approach many take. From the outside looking in, it may appear to be fearless but I think young entrepreneurs are forced to think outside the square, to position themselves in an overcrowded marketplace (often with only a degree from the school of hard knocks) and how else can that be done without some giant leap of faith? And this giant leap of faith, the courage to put your idea in motion, is much easier to do when you don’t have a mortgage and four mouths to feed. Really, if an idea is catapulted from the sky and crash lands on earth, all we have lost is our dignity. And that can be scraped back up again in minutes in fact, along the way you may have even garnered respect from the business community simply for giving it a go.
Getting that elusive idea off the ground can cost as little as $7. Figures show that non-traditional marketing methods are winning out over mainstream advertising. 92% of us for example, change the channel when a commercial comes on, so forget about raising the funds for that $ million TV campaign. What you need to do is find clutter-free advertising space.
BuddyGopher, a company started by Nick Gray when he was still at university did it with a budget of $7. Seeing the overcrowded bulletin boards of university campuses and the endless amounts of over processed advertising materials ending up in the campus bins he went against the grain and created a poster that looked like ‘absolute shit’. Why? Because every student would realize that it didn’t come from a big advertiser trying to shove a marketing message down their throat. He targeted the freshman dorms placing the posters in high-traffic areas rather than on the overcrowded billboards. In four months BuddyGopher had 13 000 users, 15 000 registered screen names with clients from Japan, Italy and Germany. What you do with your new found fans is the next step in the process.
The moral of the story is, dare to be different. Find clutter-free advertising space and as Nike very well marketed, ‘Just Do It’.
Leave a Comment